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The Mysterious Field of Engineering Systems

Norman Augustine: June 16, 2009; Running Time: 0:51:40

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

One of the nation’s revered technology leaders dispenses anecdotes and wisdom on the slippery subject of engineering systems (or systems engineering). Norm Augustine just can’t get a handle on the discipline: “No one agrees on what it is, or what it does.” After years in industries like Lockheed Martin, Augustine has come up with “Norm’s Rules,” and can at least define ‘system’ as “having two or more elements that interact,” and ‘engineering’ as “creating the means for performing useful functions.” But these definitions don’t get you too far in the real world.

Augustine shows a fuel control system, which some engineers might view as part of a propulsion system. In turn, aeronautical engineers might think of the entire airplane as a system, and transport engineers view aircraft as merely components in systems incorporating airports, highways, shipping lanes. Augustine continues up the ladder until “our system that started as a fuel controller…seems to have the whole universe as a system.” Like Russian Matryoshka dolls, systems can always be embedded within larger systems. Even if you try to simplify a system in terms of just a few objects with a binary, on-off interaction, things can get complex very quickly. Five elements in a system can exist in more than a million possible states. Says Augustine, “A typical earth satellite has nearly one million parts; a 747 over 5 million. How does that make you feel about flying?”

Distinguishing the significant interactions and the important external influences on a system are central to designing and problem solving. And these days, engineers must include politics, public policy and economics as part of their systems. “The trick is to bound the scope of the system so it’s not too large to be analyzed and not too small to be representative.” Doing this right is “why systems engineers should be paid so much.”

Augustine concludes with his “Dirty Dozen” systems engineering traps, which have led to embarrassing bust-ups, monumental failures, and real tragedies. Notable among these: “the ubiquitous interface,” (or absence thereof). He describes how two flight control groups used different metric units and accidentally sent a Mars-bound spacecraft whizzing off into deep space. There’s the “single-point failure,” exemplified by the collapse of a football field-sized satellite dish due to a poorly designed bracket. There’s software, “which like entropy, always increases:” a Mariner spacecraft headed in the wrong direction due to a missing hyphen in 100 thousand lines of code. The problem with most systems ultimately is that they “contain human elements … and humans sometimes do irrational things.”

Lecture Details

Location: Wong Auditorium

“I am an engineer. I’m one of those people who designed your computer so that when you want to shut it off you click on “start”.”

Norm Augustine

About the Speaker

Norman Augustine

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Retired
Lockheed Martin Corporation

Norman R. Augustine is also a former Under Secretary of the Army. He currently serves as a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Advisory Council. He chaired the National Academy of Sciences' panel that produces the 2005 report, "Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future."

Among Augustine’s many honors are the National Medal of Technology and the U.S. Department of Defense's highest civilian award, the Distinguished Service Medal, given to him five times. Most recently, he was awarded the 2009 American Chemical Society Public Service Award, the 2008 National Science Foundation Vannevar Bush Award, the 2007 Bower Award for Business Leadership, from The Franklin Institute, the 2005 AAAS Philip Hauge Abelson Prize and the 2006 Public Welfare Medal from the National Academy of Science.

Augustine served as chairman and principal officer of the American Red Cross for nine years and as chairman of the NAE, the AUSA, the AIA, and the Defense Science Board. He is a former president of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Boy Scouts of America. He is a current or former member of the Board of Directors of ConocoPhillips, Black and Decker, Procter & Gamble and Lockheed Martin and is a member of the board of trustees of Colonial Williamsburg, a trustee emeritus of Johns Hopkins, and a former member of the board of trustees of Princeton and MIT. He holds eighteen honorary degrees. Augustine attended Princeton University where he graduated with a B.S.E. in Aeronautical Engineering, magna cum laude, and an M.S.E.