We face countless challenges in the 21st Century: national defense, building and transportation infrastructure, energy demand and clean water, frequent natural disasters, global market competition, rising healthcare costs, and an ageing population, to name a few.
While daunting, these problems share several common features. They are complex and multifaceted, they have emergent and unpredictable behavior, and their solutions must integrate knowledge from multiple disciplines in engineering and beyond while managing a wide range of risks and uncertainties. Unfortunately, common approaches to solving these problems are ad hoc and reductionist, often resulting in cost over-runs, schedule delays, and solutions that perform poorly. It is clear that we have reached the limits of what these approaches can do. To proceed, we need a more rigorous and deeper understanding of complex engineered systems and how they should be designed.
With this in mind, we organized this Special Issue to help establish a foundation...
