Proceedings of the workshop on systems engineering in electrical engineering education: Introduction

The author establishes a keynote for the session by attempting the difficult task of defining a system. The definition I will give was arrived at several years ago and it seems to have stood the test of time reasonably well. A system is a collection of entities or things (animate or inaniimate) which receives certain inputs and is constrained to act concertedly upon them to produce certain outputs with the objective of maximizing some function of the inputs and outputs. Before discussing this definition it might be well to consider first why systems (in this sense) have begun to receive special attention. During the ensuing discussion, Dr. Kershner was asked to comment on the teaching of systems in the undergraduate and graduate levels. He replied that the schools should continue to teach basic engineering in the early college years, and specific courses in systems engineering should be confined to the late college or preferably the graduate level. His experience has shown that the best systems engineers are those who have spent considerable time as specialists and then subsequently broadened into the systems viewpoint, and that attempts to teach systems engineering to someone too young and who has not had the discipline of a specialty have not been successful.