Teaching Systems Thinking to Engineering Undergraduates Using the CLIOS Process

The introductory science courses taken by engineering undergraduates are usually intensely reductionist in form, silos in physics, chemistry, biology, and so forth. Then, their engineering subjects in the early undergraduate years often tend to be reductionist as well, focusing on a fairly narrow view of the engineering issues practitioners face. Even the design classes often do not account for the socio-technical context for much of the engineering design space that involves a complex interaction between various technologies and the multiple stakeholder views. This paper describes a subject called Engineering System Design, which attempts to create a broader perspective for third-year students in engineering—and indeed in related disciplines in management and planning. It is a combination of lectures on methods related to systems thinking and a semester-long class-wide complex socio-technical system design utilizing these methods and concepts. In recent years, the case has focused on the transportation of spent nuclear fuel to Yucca Mountain, Nevada and related issues in global climate change. Experiences in teaching this class will be discussed and some techniques adopted to enable learning are presented

Teaching about Complex Sociotechnical Systems (CSS)

Prof Chris Magee and I teach the doctoral seminar in engineering systems (ESD.83) required for all ESD doctoral students usually in the first semester they are registered as doctoral students. One of the assignments deals with students characterizing a complex sociotechnical system (CSS) of interest to them along various dimensions. For this assignment we provide them with the following paper: Complex, Sociotechnical Systems (CSS): Some Fundamental Concepts and ask the students to use the framework provided by the paper to do their characterizations. I thought this short paper (and the assignment) would be of interested to faculty teaching other comparable courses in various programs in engineering, management, systems engineering, social science, and so forth. We include the assignment itself as an appendix to the paper. Comments are more than welcome. I emphasize this is not intended as a research paper but more a teaching note to help students structure their thinking in a consistent manner

Concepts in Uncertainty—Four brief teaching notes

In Spring 2010 I taught—for the first time—an undergraduate required subject in project evaluation (1.011). In the course of that teaching, I wrote and distributed several teaching notes, which were intended to illustrate for the student various systems concepts. The ones included here focused on the theme of uncertainty and how one deals with it. The first two teaching notes deal with uncertainly in weather prediction and other natural phenomena. The first built on a “snowstorm that never happened” in Boston, as dire forecasts for snow were not indeed realized in February 2010. The paper tries to explain why this kind of thing can happen, given the relationship between storm tracks and amounts of fallen snow at a particular site. The second deals with tsunamis and the state-of-the-art in prediction of tsunamis, which occur as a result of earthquakes. This was motivated by an earthquake that took place in Chile, which many were concerned would lead to tsunamis across the Pacific, with dire effects on islands such as Guam and potentially even Japan. Here big tsunamis were predicted but didn’t occur. Again, we used that example to highlight uncertainties and why errors of this sort were made. The third and fourth teaching notes deal with professional American football and decision-making under uncertainty. I tried to write these so that one didn’t have to be expert in the rules of football to follow the argument. In November 2009, New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, made a quite controversial decision trying to convert a first down on a fourth down play in the last two minutes of a game with the Indianapolis Colts. The Patriots were leading at the time and a successful first down would have allowed the Patriots to retain possession of the ball, guaranteeing a win. His gamble failed; the Patriots did not make the first down and so surrendered the ball, and ultimately lost the game. So the third teaching note tried to explain why Belichick—widely hailed as one of the best coaches in NFL football history—could have made such a “blunder.” The fourth teaching note was a follow up and was concerned with the concept of rationality. Economists use the “rational actor” model to “predict” what people will do when faced with various choices. Often the economists are wrong in their predictions because their definition of rationality may well differ from that of the people actually making the decisions. We illustrate that by considering metrics other than simply maximizing the probability of winning the football game, as in teaching note 3. We included an “embarrassment factor,” which reflects some football coaches concern with appearing foolish when they make a gamble that fails. So they may make an “irrational” decision in the eyes of some, because they are not maximizing their team’s chance to win, but also include in their calculation how embarrassed they might be by their decision, which the coach sees as entirely rational. These teaching notes would be of interest to the reader who is concerned with teaching uncertainty concepts to undergraduates, and may be of value to those who teach introductory graduate classes as well. Any comments on the substance, content, clarity, and value of the approach would be greatly appreciated

ITS: What We Know Now that We Wish We Knew Then: A Retrospective on the ITS 1992 Strategic Plan

From September 1991 until June 1992, a core writing team, which included the author, worked on what was the first Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) strategic plan in the United States. This plan was entitled, "A Strategic Plan for IVHS in the United States." It served to define the ITS program at a national scale in a way that has been characterized as seminal. The plan, by most accounts, served as the blueprint for the early development of ITS in the U.S. and as the basis for the subsequent plans produced by ITS America, the federal government, various states, and a number of private-sector organizations. This paper explores numerous aspects of ITS retrospectively, contrasting views from 11 years ago, when the Strategic Plan was produced, with the current reality. Areas discussed include Advanced Traveler Information Systems (ATIS), Advanced Transportation Management Systems (ATMS), reliability, getting the ITS program off the ground in the early 90s, strategic use of information, automated network management, electronic toll collection (ETC), congestion pricing, architecture, commercial vehicle operations (CVO), Advanced Public Transportation Systems (APTS), and regions. The paper closes by comparing ITS with the Interstate, and finally by discussing the upcoming reauthorization of the Transportation Efficiency Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21) and what has been learned through this retrospective about ITS-related issues on that reauthorization

ESD Summer Reading Lists 2003–2011

Back in 2003, when ESD was a toddler of about 41⁄2, we were preparing for our spring semester offsite traditionally held at the end of the academic year in late May or early June. I had the idea of preparing a short list of books with relevance to the ESD mission—the study of complex sociotechnical systems—and presented that idea to the then (and founding) ESD director Prof. Daniel Roos. He agreed it would be worthwhile as an experiment, and so I did create the first ESD Summer Faculty Reading List. A “summer” reading list carries the suggestion of books you can take to “the beach”. So no “text books” were included. The books were treatments of critical contemporary issues that the world faces, important methods and perspectives germane to these issues and the complex sociotechnical systems in general, and relevant history. In retrospect, the beach would likely be too distracting a venue for many of these books

Collected Views on Complexity in Systems

The term complexity is used in many different ways in the systems domain. The different uses of this term may depend upon the kind of system being characterized, or perhaps the disciplinary perspective being brought to bear. The purpose of this paper is to gather and organize different views of complexity, as espoused by different authors. The purpose of the paper is not to make judgments among various complexity definitions, but rather to draw together the richness of various intellectual perspectives about this concept, in order to understand better how complexity relates to the concept of engineering systems. I have either quoted directly or done my best to properly paraphrase these ideas, apologizing for when I have done so incorrectly or in a misleading fashion. I hope that this paper will be useful as we begin to think through the field of engineering systems. The paper concludes with some short takes -- pungent observations on complexity by various scholars -- and some overarching questions for subsequent discussion

ESD Summer Reading Lists 2003–2013

Back in 2003, when ESD was a toddler of about 4 1⁄2, we were preparing for our spring semester offsite traditionally held at the end of the academic year in late May or early June. I had the idea of preparing a short list of books with relevance to the ESD mission-the study of complex sociotechnical systems-and presented that idea to the then (and founding) ESD director Prof. Daniel Roos. He agreed it would be worthwhile as an experiment, and so I did create the first ESD Summer Faculty Reading List. A “summer” reading list carries the suggestion of books you can take to “the beach”. So no “text books” were included. The books were treatments of critical contemporary issues that the world faces, important methods and perspectives germane to these issues and the complex sociotechnical systems in general, and relevant history. In retrospect, the beach would likely be too distracting a venue for many of these books! I got some “attaboys” on the 2003 list. A number of my colleagues said it was nice to take a look at my ideas about what books might be interesting reading. So with that positive feedback, I began to do this ESD Faculty Summer Reading List each year. When I did it the second year, I noted that this had now become a “tradition” and with an organization as young as ESD, we needed all the traditions we could get. You can see where it has gone from here. The tradition has continued to the present day, with now eleven years of history for this reading list. In the early days, the commentary on the books was largely my own. As years wore on we would include materials that others-the publisher or book reviewers-had prepared with some supplementary comments from me. And in later years my comments became less and less prevalent and even non-existent. Another thing we did regularly was to include books that had been published during that current academic year by ESD faculty, so this served as a mechanism for highlighting the scholarly work of my ESD colleagues and in 2012, the four books in the MIT Press Engineering Systems book series were all included. In any case, we have these reading lists encompassing books over this eleven-year period and thought it would be helpful to publish it as an ESD working paper to give our colleagues at MIT and outside the Institute access in one document to this eclectic potpourri of books. You may even find something you want to read that you missed the first time around. We hope the reader finds this compendium to be useful and we look forward to any feedback that you may have including suggestions for 2014 and forward

Uncertainty and Inter-jurisdictional High-speed Rail Planning: Insights from Portugal and the United Kingdom

Within public policy and academic discourses, high-speed rail (HSR) is presented as a way of achieving “smarter” or more sustainable forms of growth. Realizing this promise requires coordinated policy efforts across levels of government and at different moments along a project’s timeline. The research presented here makes use of a systems perspective to study the barriers to- and opportunities of inter-jurisdictional HSR planning. The paper draws on interview material with officials involved in the Portuguese and United Kingdom HSR planning processes. Uncertainty is found to be of significant relevance to the manner in which national and local or regional governments interact. Those interactions in turn affect the realized physical reality of the HSR network and its integration into existing land use and transport systems. The paper examines two sources of uncertainty—uncertainty of outcomes and the uncertainty of a multi-actor inter-jurisdictional system of control. Case studies are used to explore how existing processes and evaluations mechanisms affect the level to which local knowledge and initiatives are incorporated into iterative HSR system design. The research additionally reveals how initial conditions can be important determinants of HSR success by shaping a system’s ability to adapt to realizations of currently uncertain futures. The paper concludes by offering two approaches to building a HSR implementation process that successfully incorporates HSR-supportive local and regional policies. The approaches combine formal inter-jurisdictional planning commitments with informal coalition building, to together enhance HSR’s ability to achieve its full potential

Financing Methods for High-Speed Rail with Application to Portugal

High-Speed Rail (HSR) is of substantial and growing interest around the world. The European Union (EU) sees it as an integrating force; China is investing at an extraordinary level and even the U.S. is trying to move forward. Although HSR is expected to shrink the temporal distance between cities, reshape the travel patterns of people toward—we hope—environmentally-friendly ones, create an image effect for the country building it, promote regional economics, etc., HSR is an expensive alternative. It is more capital intensive than other transportation projects in both unit cost (the cost per lane or track km) and total cost. On the other hand, HSR can aid in the formations of megaregions with the potential for economic growth. This paper discusses the cost characteristics of HSR, analyzes HSR’s potential economic influence on megaregions, and identifies megaregion-related revenues that can make HSR more financially viable: specifically, we discuss the use of value capture mechanisms to capture the megaregion economic benefits of HSR in order to finance such systems

Design of Ground Delay Programs Considering the Stakeholder Perspective

A Ground Delay Program (GDP) is an initiative used by the FAA to manage the rate at which aircraft demand arrival at capacity-constrained airports. In this paper, we adapt a framework developed by Mitchell et al. (1997) to identify and determine the importance of the key stakeholders in the design of a GDP. Comparing our results with current practice, we find that passengers and the federal government do not receive consideration that is commensurate with their level of importance. We conclude with suggestions for how the FAA might address this disparity in the design of GDPs