Greetings from India!

I am Soham Phanse, a final year Undergraduate from the Department of Aerospace Engineering at IIT Bombay. Since joining IIT Bombay, I have observed a lack of systems thinking perspective towards engineering problems in undergraduates, which is completely is natural, because no such courses are offered in the Core curriculum.

Keeping this end in view, I plan to blog about Systems Engineering and Dynamics and share my learnings from what I learnt through courses, projects but more importantly by working at the Student Satellite Program.

I have tried it to keep it as intuitive as possible, and technical terms to a minimum because there already exist heavily technical and in-depth reading resources on systems engineering. However, there is a steep dearth of articles accessible to and understandable by Undergraduates.

My recommendation

I would recommend everyone to read this blog sequentially, don't directly jump over to advanced articles. The articles slowly build upon things and go upto a slightly advanced level. Feel free to drop me an email in case you want to discuss! That is all I want to mention, my best wishes to the readers! Happy Systems-Engineering!!

Contents

The World of Systems

Systems Engineering

• What is a System?
• More on Systems
• What is Systems Engineering?
• System Life Cycle
• System Hierarchy
• System Design - Selection
• System Design - Requirements

System Dynamics

• Basics of System Dynamics
• Stocks and Flows - Building Blocks of Systems
• Feedback - Systems Way of Communication
• Causal Loop Diagrams
• Systems Zoo - One Stock System
• Urban Dynamics

Acknowledgements

I will be honest - the blog was a small effort which I started in my vacation to document things that I knew about Systems Theory to share it with others and especially for the undergraduate community. However, I couldn’t have learnt this much without the following individuals, I am forever indebted to the following individuals, for instilling a sense and interest (directly or indirectly) in systems theory.

• Prof. Hemendra Arya, faculty and mentor who taught me a semester long course on Systems Engineering at IIT Bombay.
• Prof. Shireesh Kedare, my advisor, who introduced me to ‘Systems Thinking’ and its applications, while I was a fresher on campus.
• Prof. Rangan Banerjee, who guided me and gave me the freedom to explore system dynamics and its applications in Socio-Economic Systems Modeling
• Prof. Jayendran Venkateswaran, who is guiding me to complete my undergraduate thesis on System Dynamics
• Prof. Donella Meadows and Prof. Peter Senge, whose books ‘Thinking in Systems’ (after whom this blog is named) and ‘The Fifth Discipline’ furthered my interests and intrigued me enough to explore more.

I can’t thank my team - IIT Bombay Student Satellite Program enough, to give me the opportunity to lead a satellite mission - wherein I could implement things that I learnt in a textbook into the real world; seniors - Shaun Zacharia, Sanskriti Bhansali, Aniruddha Ranade, Neilabh Banzal from whom I learnt a lot in terms of project management, organization theory, a lot of colleagues and juniors and friends who have had my back. Lastly I thank my Mom and Dad for all the support and encouragement they have given me from years to pursue my passion and keep working towards the goal.

Suggestions?

Feel free to suggest things you might want to see in the blog. Fill out this form, else feel free to ping me at 19D170030@iitb.ac.in