Systems Engineering Advancement Research Initiative (SEAri)

Systems Engineering Advancement Research Initiative (SEAri) brings together a set of sponsored research projects and a consortium of systems engineering leaders from industry, government, and academia. SEAri is uniquely positioned within the Engineering Systems Division (ESD) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a new kind of interdisciplinary academic unit that spans most departments within the School of Engineering, as well as the School of Science, the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and the Sloan School of Management. This setting offers a robust research and learning environment for advancing systems engineering to meet the contemporary challenges of complex socio-technical systems. SEAri has strategic relationships with several educational and research programs at MIT, including the MIT System Design & Management Program (SDM) and the Lean Advancement Initiative (LAI) Research Program at MIT.

The mission of SEAri is to Advance the theories, methods, and effective practice of systems engineering applied to complex socio-technical systems through collaborative research.

In recent years, systems engineering has received increased focus and expanded its footprint on a global scale. Many new university programs have been developed, with associated research programs, in response to the higher demand for systems approaches and skilled engineers. SEAri sees traditional systems engineering knowledge and practices evolving to meet the challenges of increasingly complex systems-of-systems. The enterprises in which systems engineering is practiced have also reached new levels of complexity, and this drives the need for new approaches. At the same time, the advancement of technology opens new possibilities for how organizations can perform engineering analysis, modeling, simulation and design. With these changes in systems, their environments, and the enabling infrastructure, the community has an urgent need for more systems research to advance the state of the art and practice. Yet, there are significant challenges as traditional research structures and educational institutions do not easily accommodate broad interdisciplinary systems research. Further, the ability to bridge the new knowledge to the community of practice is weak, so innovative mechanisms are needed.

The increasing complexity of today's systems calls for corresponding advancement of research and education to support development and deployment of methods and principles for effective conceptualization, development, testing, and sustainment of systems in a dynamic environment. In the domain of complex systems there are tremendous opportunities for success and equally tremendous risks of failure. While traditional systems engineering principles and practices are useful for certain classes of systems, many recent studies and analyses have shown that there are three significant challenges: (1) while sound traditional systems engineering practices exist, these are not always effectively applied; (2) traditional systems engineering practices are not sufficient for the engineering of complex systems of systems; and (3) the current and future workforce is inadequate for addressing the systems challenges that face the community. In order to be effective research must be performed and then transitioned to practice which relates to this realm of complex systems with expanded system of systems scope, complex context requiring a socio-technical approach, and methods to take a value-driven perspective where value propositions involve synthesis of many stakeholder needs.

The establishment of an initiative with a focus on addressing these significant challenges will further contribute to the Institute's role as a thought leader in the area of complex systems. It will also allow MIT to play a leadership role in defining the agenda of current and future challenges in the systems engineering field while leveraging existing research collaborations to advance research and education worldwide.

The Systems Engineering Advancement Research Initiative (SEAri) performs collaborative research to address advanced systems engineering challenges. SEAri is structured with four interacting “clusters” that mirror the scientific method as applied to the study of advanced systems engineering. The clusters are Value-driven Socio-Technical Architecting of Systems (V-STARS), Resource-effective Socio-Technical Architecting of Systems (R-STARS), Systems Engineering Field Research (SE-Field), and Systems Engineering Synthesis Research (SE-Synthesis). These clusters undertake related research in a portfolio of topics, whose span will provide a foundation for advancing systems engineering research and practice.

The research group has a strong foundation in the space system design and architecture domain, with more recent work branching into the transportation and infrastructure systems domain. While these domains represent past work and ongoing areas for case study analysis, the methods and practices developed by SEAri aim for truly cross-domain applicability.

The people in SEAri include dedicated researchers, graduate research assistants, and affiliated faculty. Internal joint research efforts facilitate the transfer of knowledge, skills, and creativity across faculty and students. SEAri also works collaboratively with research sponsors and consortium members to enrich research and deployment.