This year Systems Engineering (SE) is almost 70 years old. It came about in the 1940s when the term was most probably used by Bell Telephone Laboratories for the first time. The United States Department of Defense, NASA and other industries later decided to apply the discipline because of the need to identify and manipulate the properties of a system as a whole, which in complex engineering projects may greatly differ from the sum of the parts' properties. SE was first used is in South Africa during the 1980’s.
In 1990, a professional society for systems engineering, the National Council on Systems Engineering (NCOSE), was founded by representatives from a number of US corporations and organizations. NCOSE was created to address the need for improvements in systems engineering practices and education.
As a result of growing involvement from systems engineers outside of the U.S., the name of the organization was changed to the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) in 1995. There are many definitions of SE, NASA see SE as “a robust approach to the design, creation, and operation of systems. In simple terms, the approach consists of identification and quantification of system goals, creation of alternative system design concepts, performance of design trades, selection and implementation of the best design, verification that the design is properly built and integrated, and post-implementation assessment of how well the system meets (or met) the goals” , while INCOSE defines it as “An interdisciplinary approach and means to enable the realization of successful systems" . Many related fields may be considered tightly coupled to systems engineering and have areas have contributed to the development of systems engineering as a distinct entity.
Examples hereof are Cognitive systems engineering, Configuration Management, Industrial engineering, Operations research, Program management and project management, Reliability engineering and many more. Today SE is not only used in complex engineering problems, SE principles now also increasingly find applications in areas as diverse as legal process design, enterprise engineering, management, etc. The evolution of systems engineering, which continues to this day, comprises the development and identification of new methods and modelling techniques in order to better comprehend engineering systems as they grow more complex. Popular tools have been developed that are often used in the systems engineering context which include USL, UML, QFD and IDEFO.