CAREER: Accidental Knowledge: Using Accidents and other Systems Engineering Failures to Inform Research and Education in Systems Engineering

学院早期职业发展(Career)计划研究项目的目标是通过三个步骤探索大型项目中系统工程失败的原因：(1)详细分析过去的系统工程失败，以确定系统工程中的缺陷；(2)在行业和政府组织的实践中对系统工程进行调查，以质疑或验证这些发现；以及(3)利用这些发现来改进系统工程课程和交付方法。尽管尽了最大努力，项目还是以系统工程旨在防止的方式失败。失败率丝毫没有下降的迹象。因此，目前基于方法、工具和过程的方法不起作用。我们需要做的不仅仅是提出更好的过程--我们需要一个信息丰富、能够适应广泛环境和行业的基础，如采矿、石油和天然气、化工和航空航天，以指导防止或减少失败的设计和操作选择。如果成功，这项研究将有助于减少工程项目的失败，并为健全的、数据知情的系统工程基础改进奠定基础。这项工作的教育部分结合了基于研究的课程改进与对学生实际学习的严格评估(与自我报告的数据相反)，涉及一系列纵向课程。研究结果将用于改进系统工程课程和教学方法。

The objective of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program research project is to explore the causes of systems engineering failures in large projects in a three-step process: (1) Detailed analysis of past system engineering failures to identify deficiencies in systems engineering; (2) Investigations of systems engineering in practice at industry and government organizations to challenge or validate these findings; and (3) Use of these findings to improve systems engineering curricula and delivery methods. Despite best efforts, projects fail in ways that systems engineering is intended to prevent. The rate of failures shows no sign of decreasing. Therefore, current approaches based on methods, tools and processes are not working. We need to do more than propose better processes -- we need a foundational basis that is informative and can be adapted to a broad range of circumstances and industries, such as mining, oil and gas, chemical, and aerospace, to guide design and operational choices that prevent or mitigate failures.If successful, this research will contribute to reducing failures of engineering projects and form the basis for sound, data-informed improvments to the fundamentals of systems engineering. The educational component of this work combines research-based course improvements with rigorous assessments of actual student learning (as opposed to self-reported data) across a longitudinal set of courses. The findings will be used to improve the systems engineering curricula and delivery methods.