Reigniting the Transdisciplinary Nature of Industrial and Systems Engineering

Abstract

Industrial and systems engineering developed as a transdiscipline by integrating engineering principles and methods with mathematics, physics, and sociology to design, improve, and install integrated systems where people are present. Nevertheless, it has strayed from its transdisciplinary nature due to the necessary specialization of its knowledge areas and their respective application domains. Frederick Taylor stated that scientific management’s (ISE) purpose was to maximize employee and employer benefits while reducing impacts on society and the environment through appropriate resource utilization. This is an increasingly complex problem that spans disciplines and domains of application, calling for a reunification of the ISE knowledge areas and their expansion to other disciplinary domains (such as AI). In this work, we adapt a framework, developed by INCOSE’s Bridge Team, that demonstrates how industrial and systems engineering is linked to numerous disciplines and domains of application. We establish that by connecting our motivation to our capabilities, a value loop emerges, enabling the pursuit of increasingly elegant solutions to increasingly complex problems. The bridge that connects motivation and capabilities is our transdisciplinarity; thus, the value of Industrial and Systems Engineering is increased.