Designing the Construction Process
After its initial development in the telecommunications industry (Hall 1962, Bode 1967), systems engineering flourished mainly in the defence and aerospace industries. As a spin-off from the development in these areas, systems engineering itself has developed and grown to accommodate many more domains all over the world. One of these domains is the construction industry. This paper elaborates on the tailoring of systems engineering principles to a construction industry environment: governments, railroads, city boards, highways and a lot of steel and concrete. It examines the equivalence between this domain and the more traditional systems engineering processes as a path to recasting systems engineering in a language that would make it more immediately useful and acceptable in the construction. Finally, the paper discusses some features of the implementation of such a reformulation undertaken within the Dutch construction industry, illustrating the communalities for applying Systems Engineering within the construction domain throughout the world.