Systems Engineering is future-fitted engineering
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In the industry, engineering projects are mapped across years; not semesters. The redesigned Systems Engineering core features a sequence of courses across two years (4 semesters), offering students a selection of industry hubs on which to focus, from design and implementation to maintenance and end-of-life practices.
“We scope authentic projects with external clients, usually focussed on a specific capability within a larger system,” said Dr Jeremy Smith, one of the primary architects of the Systems Engineering redesign. “The student teams explore with their clients how to have a positive impact in areas like resilience or disaster response, food security, energy, transportation, or healthcare.”
Students might design a remote energy system and analyse its social, environmental, and economic impact across two semesters in Year 2. And if they stay with the same industry partner, they might focus on implementation, performance, maintenance, and sustainable decommissioning in Year 3.
Third-year student Charlotte Fell said the integration of real-world projects has afforded her “a harmony of conceptual and practical learning”.
“We’re creating a generation of engineers more aware of and focused on deeply understanding the context in which their system or design operates,” she said.
Students can switch between hubs to gain experience in numerous domains. Currently the project hubs are Agri-Technology, Energy Transitions, Healthcare, Humanitarian Engineering, Space, and Transportation. New project hubs can be added to respond to emerging industry demands, national priorities, and research opportunities.
The confluence between engineering education and practice is continued in Year 4 with the Capstone project, where students self-select into year-long enterprises proposed by a diverse roster of industry clients, with students serving as engineering design consultants solving real-world problems.
When prospective students visit campus to ask about the ANU engineering program, many of them have a specific branch of engineering in mind, such as renewable energy or mechatronics. For most, the concept of Systems Engineering is new.
If their goal is to become an electrical engineer, will the Systems Engineering core help or hinder them?
“It's hard to think of any project where you just have electrical engineers working by themselves,” said Dr Marnie Shaw, who leads the Systems Engineering teaching team. “When you're working in the real world, you need to be able to work with people from other backgrounds and other disciplines.”
Ms Weakley agreed.
“Maybe traditionally there was a room just for electrical engineers,” she said. “But realistically, engineers are called upon to do such a diverse range of tasks at the moment. Technology is moving so fast that it’s important to have a skill set that can be generalised for emerging contexts.”
“Electrical systems interact with other systems: energy systems, security applications, resilience applications,” said Dr Smith. “With a Systems perspective, you're more naturally suited to the way that practise is being done in engineering today. We don't have ‘just electrical systems’ anymore. All systems will have a control element, an embedded element, and software.”
What if a student’s career goal is to work in civil engineering, should they study at ANU, even though it doesn’t offer a Civil Engineering major?
“If you’re really set on doing civil engineering, you should go to a school that just does civil engineering,” said Dr Shaw. “But who knows when they start at university exactly which area of engineering they want to work in?”
“I see all the time students who come in with a fixed idea of what they want to do. Our program gives them the opportunity to explore and discover interests and passions that they had no idea about before they started here.”
Dr Smith added that the Systems Engineering approach has a lot to offer in civil engineering practice because of its strong emphasis on environmental impact and lifecycle assessment.
“If you look at civil engineering, it’s about building infrastructure and maintaining infrastructure, but what counts as infrastructure is changing rapidly and dramatically,” he said. “For instance, a big part of infrastructure nowadays is around zero emission targets. Most companies and businesses have made very ambitious commitments for 2030, 2040 and 2050. But the detail is lacking. They need help working out how they're going to do it.”
Meeting such targets means assessing and reducing emissions of assets over their entire lifecycle: from raw material usage and construction to transport, logistics, and end-of-life. ANU engineering students spend three years doing that, regardless of their major.
MORE: https://cecc.anu.edu.au/systems-engin...