Evolution of systems engineering scholarship from 2000 to 2015, with particular emphasis on software

Systems engineering in 2018 has many challenges, both to build the complex systems of systems of the future, and to build the complex systems of which they are composed. Systems engineering needs to be able to design around stable requirements when there are long‐lead manufactured items to be incorporated, and also needs to be able to evolve the design along with evolving requirements for larger systems. The “systems engineering of yesterday,” which, when done well, greatly enhanced the design and use of stand‐alone systems, has to be extended to adequately cover evolving systems of systems, being agile and resilient and responsive. This paper compares articles in 1 year of the first 5 years and 1 year of the last 5 years out of the 20‐year history of the Systems Engineering journal, and considers generality via lexicographic trend analysis. Based on the topics addressed by the articles in each year, there is more interest today in the larger system (e.g., economics, simulation of the environment, systems‐of‐systems), on quality attributes (more often called “ilities” or life‐cycle properties in systems engineering) and on modeling, management, and technology maturity. There is less interest today in process and requirements. These can be explained by systems engineering having moved away from initially deeply‐explored topics into new areas.