Systems Engineering in the Fourth Industrial Revolution

19Transdisciplinary Engineering Systems

Nel Wognum John Mo and Josip Stjepandić

Synopsis

Transdisciplinary processes are aimed at solving problems that cannot be solved by one person nor one discipline, like urban planning, waste treatment facility, or a disruptive innovation. A system view is a good way to describe transdisciplinary processes. Transdisciplinary systems are complex systems. This means that goals of the system may conflict due to the people that act in the system. Transdisciplinary systems are also organizational systems. Inherently, system processes are performed by people, possibly with the help of information systems and other tools. All kinds of arrangements exist to make the processes manageable, like organizational structures, teams, or social norms known as culture. Different levels of transdisciplinary systems exist, while in each level different kinds of people interact. For example, a system aimed at creating a complex service system is different from the complex service system itself. In this chapter, we mainly focus on transdisciplinary processes in the engineering domain. The concept of a transdisciplinary system will be explored and defined. Two examples of a two‐layer system will be described to illustrate the concept.

19.1 Introduction

The concept of transdisciplinary processes has been the subject of discourse in the past few decades in the context of large, complex, ill‐defined problems, also called wicked problems. Solutions to such problems ...