Engineering Informatics to Support Civil Systems Engineering Practice

Systems engineering is the interdisciplinary engineering field that focuses on the design of complex physical systems to optimize the system's performance over its life-cycle. To support such optimization efforts a number of computational modeling methods are required: ontological modeling, stochastic modeling, and process simulation modeling. Despite this need, the field of systems engineering has mainly focused on the development and discussion of managerial methods. This paper tries to provide a first starting point for a discussion about a framework to understand how the above mentioned computational methods can support system engineers. The paper introduces a first set of important methods and tries to integrate them in an overall framework for analysing engineered systems from different points of view. For each of the methods we also provide a simple illustrative example from our ongoing systems engineering teaching efforts at the TU Berlin.