This volume aims to provide the reader with a broad cross-section of empirical research being carried out into engineers at work. The chapters provide pointers to other relevant studies over recent decades an important aspect, we believe, because this area has only recently begun to coalesce as a field of study and up to now relevant empirical re
Engineering represents an ordered activity of creative design and inventive manufacture of ingenious devices. Its practitioners have thereby stimulated individuals, enlivened communities, enriched civilizations, and contributed to the shaping of cultures.The authors of this innovative text develop a systematic framework for engineering in time, making extensive use of adaptive heterogeneous progressions. When combined with considerations of feedback, feedforward, recursion, and branching, an evolving and comprehensive characterization of engineering becomes evident. It is in this blending of chronology, emerging theory, and professional practice that engineering finds its foundational role in innovative design, device reliability, intellectual property, technology risks, public safety, professional ethics, material accounting, and other recurring themes relevant to contemporary engineering. Engineering clearly emerges as a complex and increasingly important profession.The authors introduce concepts and methods — including a critical definition of engineering -and selectively adapt symbolic-mathematical relations. The technical level of analysis is suitable for the undergraduate curriculum commonly encountered in colleges of engineering./a
This book describes an approach to engineering education that integrates a comprehensive set of personal, interpersonal, and professional engineering skills with engineering disciplinary knowledge in order to prepare innovative and entrepreneurial engineers. The education of engineers is set in the context of engineering practice, that is, Conceiving, Designing, Implementing, and Operating (CDIO) through the entire lifecycle of engineering processes, products, and systems. The book is both a description of the development and implementation of the CDIO model and a guide to engineering programs worldwide that seek to improve the education of young engineers.
Winner in its first edition of the Best New Undergraduate Textbook by the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the American Association of Publishers (AAP), Kosky, et al is the first text offering an introduction to the major engineering fields, and the engineering design process, with an interdisciplinary case study approach. It introduces the fundamental physical, chemical and material bases for all engineering work and presents the engineering design process using examples and hands-on projects. Organized in two parts to cover both the concepts and practice of engineering: Part I, Minds On, introduces the fundamental physical, chemical and material bases for all engineering work while Part II, Hands On, provides opportunity to do design projects An Engineering Ethics Decision Matrix is introduced in Chapter 1 and used throughout the book to pose ethical challenges and explore ethical decision-making in an engineering context Lists of "Top Engineering Achievements" and "Top Engineering Challenges" help put the material in context and show engineering as a vibrant discipline involved in solving societal problems New to this edition: Additional discussions on what engineers do, and the distinctions between engineers, technicians, and managers (Chapter 1) New coverage of Renewable Energy and Environmental Engineering helps emphasize the emerging interest in Sustainable Engineering New discussions of Six Sigma in the Design section, and expanded material on writing technical reports Re-organized and updated chapters in Part I to more closely align with specific engineering disciplines new end of chapter excercises throughout the book
This book highlights the unique need for philosophy among engineers, which stems from issues regarding their knowledge (epistemology), role or being (ontology) and influence (ethics). It discusses practice, context, ethics, models and failure as key aspects of engineering, and provides an easy but essential introduction to philosophy for engineers by presenting four key philosophers and linking them to these aspects: Karl Popper (failure), Thomas Kuhn (models), Michael Polanyi (practice & ethics) and Martin Heidegger (context & ethics). Popper, Kuhn and Polanyi are philosophers of science (epistemologists) who have challenged the view that science is a ‘cool, detached’ discipline, since it also depends on human imagination (Popper), consensus (Kuhn) and judgment plus artistry (Polanyi); factors that are central to engineering. Heidegger (an ontologist) critiqued technology on the one hand (ethics), but also stressed the importance of ‘doing’ over ‘knowing,’ thus ‘authenticating’ the highly pragmatic engineering profession. Science is the ‘core’ component of engineering, which is overlaid by a variety of heuristics . Practice-based knowledge can be formalized, with artificial intelligence (AI) offering a valuable tool for engineering, just as mathematics has done for science. The book also examines systems thinking in engineering. Featuring numerous diagrams, tables and examples throughout, the book is easily accessible to engineers.
Organizations big and small have started to realize just how crucial system and application reliability is to their business. Theyâ??ve also learned just how difficult it is to maintain that reliability while iterating at the speed demanded by the marketplace. Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a proven approach to this challenge. SRE is a large and rich topic to discuss. Google led the way with Site Reliability Engineering, the wildly successful Oâ??Reilly book that described Googleâ??s creation of the discipline and the implementation thatâ??s allowed them to operate at a planetary scale. Inspired by that earlier work, this book explores a very different part of the SRE space. The more than two dozen chapters in Seeking SRE bring you into some of the important conversations going on in the SRE world right now. Listen as engineers and other leaders in the field discuss: Different ways of implementing SRE and SRE principles in a wide variety of settings How SRE relates to other approaches such as DevOps Specialties on the cutting edge that will soon be commonplace in SRE Best practices and technologies that make practicing SRE easier The important but rarely explored human side of SRE David N. Blank-Edelman is the bookâ??s curator and editor.
This book sets out the principles of engineering practice, knowledge that has come to light through more than a decade of research by the author and his students studying engineers at work. Until now, this knowledge has been almost entirely unwritten, passed on invisibly from one generation of engineers to the next, what engineers refer to asexpe
This book is designed to assist industrial engineers and production managers in developing procedural and methodological engineering tools to meet industrial standards and mitigate engineering and production challenges. It offers practitioners expert guidance on how to implement adequate statistical process control (SPC), which takes account of the capability to ensure a stable process and then regulate if variations take place due to variables other than a random variation. Powerful engineering models of new product introduction (NPI), continuous improvement (CI), and the eight disciplines (8D) model of problem solving techniques are explained. The final three chapters introduce new methodological models in operations research (OR) and their applications in engineering, including the hyper-hybrid coordination for process effectiveness and production efficiency, and the Kraljic-Tesfay portfolio matrix of industrial buying.
