The Design of Large-Scale Complex Engineered Systems: Present Challenges and Future Promise

Large-Scale Complex Engineered Systems (LSCES) dominate the aerospace, maritime and nuclear industries. Systems such as aircraft carriers, nuclear power plants, spacecraft, and submarines represent several unique challenges for the engineering designer, as well as the systems engineer. These challenges include extraordinary costs and risks, and the inability to fully test and evaluate the complete system until it is nearly operational. These systems have become increasingly complex and sophisticated over the past fifty years, largely due to the sheer magnitude of inherent couplings that exist between disciplines, components, geographically-distributed organizations, and people. These systems are regularly prone to crippling time and cost overruns, largely due to the unintended consequences arising from unknown or unexpected interactions. The methods, processes and tools used by practitioners have not kept pace with the growing complexity of LSCES. Indeed, a complex system is now required in order to design and produce a complex system, where the elements of both draw just as heavily from social fields as they do from technical fields. This paper will explore the challenges that exist in the design of LSCES, the existing foundations from which we can draw to build a new framework for design of LSCES, and the research opportunities that will hopefully lead to new theories for the design of LSCES. This paper represents the opinions and vision of the authors, who recognize that the true challenge of advancing the design of LSCES will depend on the views and contributions of an extremely broad and diverse number of disciplines from technical and social fields.