CESUN Annual Meeting

The Council of Engineering Systems Universities (CESUN) Annual Meeting was held at the University of Illinois on April 21 and 22. Representatives from member universities in USA, Europe, Asia and Oceania attended the meeting to discuss systems engineering education. SDM Assistant Professor Nobuaki Minato, the only attendee from the Asian region, introduced SDM’s international research and education activities. The most notable discussion at the meeting centered on whether diversity or uniformity has more value in Systems Engineering (SE) education. It is necessary to understand diversity to accurately grip complex and various elements, but at the same time unified approaches are indispensable to build these elements into an integrated system. SE education must have diversity to suit the variety of cultures in many countries and many companies, but SE education without uniformity can have a negative effect on a global basis. Member universities acknowledge that there is no perfect SE education, and have focused on enhancing their doctoral programs in recent years to improve the quality of SE theory education. Likewise, a top-class US university is promoting research on applying SE to healthcare to correspond with the Obama administration’s healthcare reform.  It is amazing that SE, which originally developed in the space and aviation fields, is being applied to healthcare.