Our History

Originally founded as the Council of Engineering Systems Universities, the organization was renamed in 2025 to the Council of Engineering Systems Scholars and Universities (CESUN) to reflect its evolving and inclusive membership.

The Council of Engineering Systems Universities was established in 2004 as a group of universities with a common interest: addressing some of the great challenges of the 21st century by advancing engineering systems as a new field of study. CESUN fosters the exchange of ideas and experiences, supports joint research initiatives, cultivates a strong community of practice, and works to increase the visibility and impact of the field.

For engineers, the 21st century poses new types of challenges. The landmark engineering achievements of the previous century have led to the development and growth of vast systems that are so highly complex that they create problems unlike those with which engineers have traditionally grappled. These are not just challenges of great technical complexity, such as those at the interaction points between the many smaller systems that make up the planet’s great systems of systems. They are also challenges of social and economic complexity.

Over several decades, a new engineering field of study emerged to address these challenges in systems such as energy, communications, transportation, health care, and many others. Engineering systems today encompasses programs that are called many other names, as is clear from the program names at CESUN member institutions. The roots of engineering systems lie in the broader evolution of engineering and the ways in which engineers have responded to increasing complexity. While many engineers pursued deeper scientific inquiry, others emphasized a design-oriented approach, focusing on solutions to the challenges posed by escalating technical complexity. Operations research, systems and decision analysis, industrial engineering, systems engineering—these all contributed to the expansion of engineering—but at a certain point there was a recognition that some of the greatest challenges were precisely where the technical systems had their interfaces with people, policies, regulations, culture, and behaviour. Thus, engineering systems was born to deal with these critical new problem components. Both engineering science and engineering systems are needed in the solution of large-scale, complex problems; they complement each other.

Engineering systems is a highly practical field, rooted in real-world application. Its “laboratory” is the world around us. The field focuses on developing and employing  new methods to solve challenges at the scale of the socio-technical systems in which they emerge. By nature, engineering systems is interdisciplinary, drawing from engineering in all its manifestations, as well as the social sciences and management. This is necessitated by the nature of the work itself: human actors—their values, motivations, and limitations—are as important a consideration to the engineer as are the technical artifacts and smaller systems that comprise these vast systems.