THEFOSE - Theoretical Foundations of System Engineering: A First Feedback

System engineering has experienced multiple successes over the years in various industrial projects with a strong emphasis in defense and aerospace. Recently, system engineering has gained several contributions from theory, however the field still lacks a strong theoretical foundation. This request for more theoretical foundations come from both academia and industry in order to make the best of system engineering practices and experience in increasingly multidisciplinary projects. Several research topics need to be addressed such as formal definitions of system engineering terms and concepts, systems semantics, complexity theory of multidisciplinary systems, and formal analysis of system engineering processes and standards. The impact of theoretical computer science on languages (e.g. SysML) and tools used by system engineers, the integration of quantitative methods (e.g. formal methods, value driven design, petri-nets, design space optimization, etc.) with MBSE methods and processes, along with system engineering languages (SysML) and its variants will also be included. This paper proposes a short review on the first special session - THEFOSE - Theoretical Foundations of System Engineering held at the IEEE SYSCON 2015 Conference on System Engineering.