Civil Systems Engineering

Tuesday, 24. March 2020

© skeeze - pixabay.com

The provision of a modern and socially sustainable urban infrastructure (buildings, traffic routes, etc.) is the major challenge that civil engineers will have to face in the coming decades. The complexity of the design tasks continues to increase, mainly due to a number of framework conditions with which our modern societies are confronted, such as:

• The progressive climate change, which requires extensive structural changes to the urban infrastructure, but is also largely caused by today's very resource-intensive architectural style,
• The advancing demographic developments, with ever growing cities, and an increasingly older population,
• The technological development that leads to an integration of more and more mechanical and electrical systems in buildings and infrastructure, and last but not least,
• The rapidly changing economic market conditions surrounding new start-ups in the construction industry, which are changing the traditional structure of the market more and more quickly.

Due to this increasing complexity, the necessary design processes for infrastructure projects take longer and longer, now often more than ten years. Too long to make the necessary changes in urban infrastructure that require the above-mentioned framework. In order to react to this complexity, the system technician, in addition to the already well-trained single-disciplinary civil engineers, needs a new role in the engineering design process. System engineers are specialists in the management of complex technical design processes, all around digital methods, which make it possible to integrate empirical and theoretical simulation methods across system boundaries into complex infrastructure design processes. For this purpose, the offered course focuses primarily on digital methods such as product modeling, data analysis, multi physical simulation, and the life cycle analysis of buildings in the complex and integrated design processes for urban infrastructure. The research-based approach enables students to develop new innovative methods in practice, and to apply them in design contexts.