Complex Engineered Systems Science Meets Technology [Hardcover]

This book sheds light on the large-scale engineering systems that shape and guide our everyday lives. It does this by bringing together the latest research and practice defining the emerging field of Complex Engineered Systems. Understanding, designing, building and controlling such complex systems is going to be a central challenge for engineers in the coming decades. This book is a step toward addressing that challenge.

Recent advances in science and technology have led to a rapid increase
in the complexity of most engineered systems. In many notable cases,
this change has been a qualitative one rather than merely one of magnitude.
A new class of Complex Engineered Systems (CES) has emerged as a result
of technologies such as the Internet, GPS, wireless networking, micro-robotics, MEMS, fiber-optics and nanotechnology. These complex engineered systems are composed of many heterogeneous subsystems and are characterized by observable complex behaviors that emerge as a result of nonlinear spatio-temporal interactions among the subsystems at several levels of organization and abstraction. Examples of such systems include the World-Wide Web, air and ground traffic networks, distributed manufacturing environments, and globally distributed supply networks, as well as new paradigms such as self-organizing sensor networks, self-configuring robots, swarms of autonomous aircraft, smart materials and structures, and self-organizing computers. Understanding, designing, building and controlling such complex systems is going to be a central challenge for engineers in the coming decades.

Complex Engineered Systems: A New Paradigm.- Engineering Complex Systems: Multiscale Analysis and Evolutionary Engineering.- The Structure and Dynamics of Complex Product Design.- On the Nature of Design.- Creation of desirable complexity: strategies for designing selforganized systems.- Understanding the Complexity of Designlӻ