A Consilience-Based Approach to Engineering Services in Global Supply Chains

Technology life cycles are becoming shorter as is the time for those technologies to become ubiquitous in the society. The Industrial Revolution took about 150 years; but the computer revolution took only 50 years. Cell phones, which hit the market in the early 1980s took only 25 years to become a global phenomenon. Computers and cell phones are two examples of a growing number of products that marry hardware, software, communications, and physical components into what are called cyber physical systems. Even though humans are, for the most part, only users of these systems, they are already having a considerable impact on the evolution of society. In this paper, we focus on the next stage of that evolution, cyber-physical systems. We also focus on changes in how these systems are engineered. Formally designed only by OEMs, these systems are now engineered across the supply chain. A number of companies now provide engineering services. We discussed a number of existing approaches to systems engineering and concluded that they are inadequate. Finally, we propose a new, consilience-based approach that draws on the disciplines and practices that can inform and help resolve those inadequacies.