Rick Adcock

Defining an architecture for the Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge

The Body of Knowledge and Curriculum to Advance Systems Engineering (BKCASE™) project was originally sponsored by the US Department of Defense (DoD) and managed by the Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC). The project produced a baseline Guide to the Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge (SEBoK) and associated Graduate Reference Curriculum for Systems Engineering (GRCSE). The primary aim of this project was to bound, define and document the knowledge related to Systems Engineering (SE) practice to support education, research, professional development and practice. SEBoK version 1.0 was released in 2012 providing a flexible and evolvable organization of SE knowledge and initial baseline content. Since then the BKCASE Editorial Board has continued to update SEBoK content to ensure it is current and relevant with evolving SE knowledge. Additional detail on this is available at www.BKCASE.org. This paper will discuss the development of the SEBoK architecture and how well it achieves this aim. It will outline the ongoing SEBoK update process and discuss what The Board has learnt after 3 years of SEBoK stewardship.

Future Systems Engineering Research Directions

This paper describes a program organized by the INCOSE Academic Council to determine future directions in systems engineering (SE) research. This program, consisting of three collaborative workshops, uses a framework coupling societal needs to systems challenges and then to gaps in the capabilities of SE, which inform the direction of future SE research. The results of the first workshop are presented including a description of the Grand Challenges in five selected areas, namely, societal needs, problem definitions, desired results, obstacles, and related research questions. This paper concludes with a summary and description of the future work for this program.

INCOSE academic research forum — Future systems engineering research directions

This paper describes a program organized by the INCOSE Academic Council to determine future directions in systems engineering (SE) research. This program uses a framework coupling societal need to systems challenges, then to gaps in the capabilities of SE, which inform the direction of future SE research. The results of the first workshop are presented including a description of the grand challenges in the four selected areas of societal needs, problem definitions, desired results, obstacles and related research questions. The paper concludes with a summary and description of the future work for this program.

Integrating Systems Engineering and Systems Thinking into Undergraduate Engineering Education

This panel will discuss the challenges of Integrating Systems Engineering Knowledge and Skills in Undergraduate Education, considering why we do this, what we include and examples of how we do it. The panel is based on work done by the INCOSE Academic Forum.

9.5.0 ABET Accreditation of SE programs: How is it going and why are we doing it?

INCOSE has become one of the professional societies overseeing ABET accreditation for systems engineering. This session present an overview of INCOSEs accreditation strategy, perspectives from recent evaluators of an undergraduate and a graduate program, an international perspective, a summary of why one major school has decided not to accredit its program, and a summary of why another did attempt accreditation. A floor discussion will follow.