System Evolution and Technology Assessment

Course #SE3910

Est.imated Completion Time: 3 months

POC: NPS Online Support

Overview

This course discusses technological change, its impact on systems, and ways to predict the impact of future technology developments on system development. General topics include understanding the rate of technological change, how innovations are developed and adopted, methodologies for assessing technology growth and evolution (forecasting), limits on technological growth, and examples of technology assessment. This course uses a seminar approach with out-of-classroom reading and in-class discussions of the reading replacing traditional lectures.

Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

  • Conduct a structured assessment of technology advancement and forecasting.
  • Understand the different types of factors that affect technology advancement; and conversely understand the different ways in which technology growth affects aspects of our world including society, culture, politics, warfare, economics and scientific knowledge.
  • Understand the role and contribution of engineers, inventors, science, and predecessors in the evolution of technology.
  • Understand the lifecycle stages of technologies from precedents and conception to growth, maturation, senescence, and death.
  • Understand theories of technology evolution including diversity, combinatorial evolution, modularity, recursiveness, phenomenology, causality, domains, re-domaining, structural deepening, internal replacement, continuities and discontinuities, and imagination.
  • Describe the influences and role of technology evolution current and future warfare.
  • Describe the interplay between technology evolution and the processes of systems engineering and the systems engineering lifecycle; including the implication of technology readiness and maturation and expected advances on engineering future system solutions.
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