Course content

Products, services and processes are designed and developed in increasingly complex industrial systems. System thinking is important in modern production to ensure that sustainable practices are introduced and applied. The course presents a framework based on the systems engineering process to be used for planning, analyzing, and design of industrial systems, such as products, factories and processing plants, operation processes, information systems, and supply chains. The course will introduce principles of sustainable design with special attention to system development life cycle phases, from conceptual design to production. Major topics in the course are: sustainable development and the SDG, stakeholder identification, requirement analysis and specification, functional analysis, conceptual design, detailed design, planning for production, system testing, operation, system safety, maintainability, and reuse. Labs will encourage the students to develop soft systems skills while applying their knowledge to self-defined problems.

Learning outcome

Knowledge:

By the end of this course, the student will be able to explain the connections between sustainable development, systems thinking and systems engineering; will be able to recognize relevant system requirements; will be able to explain how systems development lifecycle models provide a roadmap for engineering practices; will be able to apply sustainable systems engineering practices to a project; and evaluate a project for the quality of its processes.

Skills:

By the end of this course, the student will be able to identify and practice the habits of systems thinkers; identify and document design elements and interfaces; implement practices for more sustainable design of products or production processes; and critically assess the engineering quality of a system.

General competence:

By the end of this course, the student will be able to apply the knowledge of sustainable systems engineering to an industrial engineering project requiring multidisciplinary and multicultural teamwork; will be able to track their progress, risks and risk mitigations activities underway; and explain the contributions of sustainable systems engineering to complex system development.

Learning methods and activities

Lectures, exercises, and laboratory-based project work applying relevant theory, methods and review of recent industrial cases are the basis for this course. Lectures are given in English.

Recommended previous knowledge

None.

Course materials

Will be given at the beginning of the semester.