Systems practice in engineering: reflections on doctoral level systems supervision

The Industrial Doctorate Centre (IDC) in Systems, a collaboration between the University of Bristol and the University of Bath, offers an Engineering Doctorate (EngD) in Systems Programme which is aimed at high-calibre engineers from graduate level to early/mid-career stage with the purpose of developing the systems-thinking capabilities of future leaders in industry. Research Engineers on this programme are based ~75% of their time in industry and focussed on a research project defined by their sponsoring company. This paper presents a personal reflection on the role of the systems supervisor on this programme with a focus on four areas of particular interest to the author i) alignment of industry needs and academic research, ii) developing an appreciation for the need for systems thinking, iii) navigating the systems literature, and iv) teaching research methods for doctoral research in systems. The purpose is to encourage and engage in debate on the development of systems practice in engineering

Contested modelling

We suggest that the role and function of expert computational modelling in real-world decision-making needs scrutiny and practices need to change. We discuss some empirical and theory-based improvements to the coupling of the modelling process and the real world, including social and behavioural processes, which we have expressed as a set of questions that we believe need to be answered by all projects engaged in such modelling.  These are based on a systems analysis of four research initiatives, covering different scales and timeframes, and addressing the complexity of intervention in a sustainability context. Our proposed improvements require new approaches for analysing the relationship between a project’s models and its publics.  They reflect what we believe is a necessary and beneficial dialogue between the realms of expert scientific modelling and systems thinking.  This paper is an attempt to start that process, itself reflecting a robust dialogue between two practitioners sat within differing traditions, puzzling how to integrate perspectives and achieve wider participation in researching this problem space.&nbsp

The Theoretical Foundation(s) for Systems Engineering?

This is the final version. Available on open access from Wiley via the DOI in this recor

The non-codified use of problem structuring methods and the need for a generic constitutive definition

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.When we use a PSM what is it we are actually doing? An answer to this question would enable the PSM community to considerably enlarge the available source of case studies by the inclusion of examples of non-codified PSM use. We start from Checkland's own proposal for a "constitutive definition" of SSM, which originated from trying to answer the question of knowing when a claim of SSM use was legitimate. By extending this idea to a generic constitutive definition for all PSMs leads us to propose a self-consistent labelling schema for observed phenomena arising from PSMs in action. This consists of a set of testable propositions, which, through observation of putative PSM use, can be used to assess validity of claims of PSM use. Such evidential support for the propositions as may be found in putative PSM use can then make it back into a broader axiomatic formulation of PSMs through the use of a set-Theoretic approach, which enables our method to scale to large data sets. The theoretical underpinning to our work is in causal realism and middle range theory. We illustrate our approach through the analysis of three case studies drawn from engineering organisations, a rich source of possible non-codified PSM use. The combination of a method for judging cases of non-codified PSM use, sound theoretical underpinning, and scalability to large data sets, we believe leads to a demystification of PSMs and should encourage their wider use. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved