Creating an Academic Systems Engineering Group ; Bootstrapping Systems Engineering Research

Systems Engineering is a young field where most systems engineers are self educated older engineers. The large need for systems engineers in industry necessitates the creation of academic systems engineering groups where education and research is combined. We describe in this paper the ongoing effort in Norway to create such an academic systems engineering group as part of the Norwegian Centre of Expertise (NCE) for Systems Engineering. We briefly discuss systems engineering as competence and the educational program. The remainder of the paper elaborates the research in systems engineering. We discuss the (im)maturity of this type of research in relation to the research methods that can de used. We describe the specific bootstrapping process that we follow in Kongsberg. The first step in the bootstrapping process is the establishment of a research agenda as joint effort of industry partners and academic staff. Based on the research agenda multiple small research projects are performed that prepare the execution of the master student research projects. We also discuss the more generic outcome of the first set of small research projects.