Systems Engineering Requires System Thinking

Systems engineering can be viewed as a collective effort incorporating a large group of engineering techniques that directly transforms the objective world using system thinking. A system is composed of several key components that are related to each other and that interact with each other. People’s understanding of a system, that is, their thinking about a system, comes from social practices. SE practices consist of thinking in a systematic way and synthesizing the various systems of things in the long term. The systems thinking approach has been around for a long time, but the actual application of systems engineering, considering all subsystems as an integrated whole, has only recently come into play. With recent rapid and complex product development and continuous expansion of production scales, an urgent need exists to develop a technology that can effectively organize and manage the planning, analysis, design, manufacture, testing, and use of complex systems—namely, systems engineering.