TABLE OF CONTENTS "The spiritual temple of the future, while it will be built largely of the old well-proved materials, will require new and ampler foundations in the light of the immense extension of our intellectual horizons."
J. Smuts, Holism and Evolution
The field of systems engineering (SE) has achieved a degree of maturity and success in its traditional scope of application domains such as aerospace, defense, transportation, and construction. While SE is working to strengthen its methods and increase its degree of success, changes are simultaneously occurring in the SE environment that generate a force for expansion beyond the traditional scope of SE. The primary area of change is the expansion to qualitatively more complex systems. For example, building a power plant is a complex engineering activity involving both technical and social elements but the behavior of a power grid across a region is substantially more complex and less predictable. The SE community is not only beginning to expand from power plants to power grids, but is also beginning to tackle problems even further beyond its traditional horizons. Representative problems include avoiding disease pandemics, creating a more viable healthcare system model, anticipating the effects of alternative energy policies, improving the effectiveness of the criminal justice system, and preventing or dealing with insurgency and terrorism. A secondary force for expansion is the emergence of new technology areas such as nanotechnology and synthetic biology. These technologies are making significant progress but the difficulty of building systems at different scales makes clear the...
