the proceedings of the 2023 conference on system engineering research: system engineering towards a smart and sustainable world

The 20th International Conference on Systems Engineering Research (CSER 2023) pushes the boundaries of systems engineering research and responds to new challenges for systems engineering. CSER 2023 invited researchers and practitioners to submit their work in alignment with the thematic focus on a smart and sustainable world. CSER was founded in 2003 by Stevens Institute of Technology and the University of Southern California, and in 2023 the conference returned to the Stevens campus in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Dinesh Verma served as the Founding Dean of the School of Systems and Enterprises at Stevens Institute of Technology from 2007 through 2017. He currently serves as the Executive Director of the Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC), a US Department of Defense sponsored University Affiliated Research Center (UARC) focused on systems engineering research. During his fifteen years at Stevens he has successfully proposed research and academic programs exceeding ＄175m in value. He has a courtesy appointment as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Biochemistry in the School of Medicine at Georgetown University. Verma served as Scientific Advisor to the Director of the Embedded Systems Institute in Eindhoven, Holland from 2003 through 2008. Prior to this role, he served as Technical Director at Lockheed Martin Undersea Systems, in Manassas, Virginia, in the area of adapted systems and supportability engineering processes, methods and tools for complex system development.

Azad M. Madni is a University Professor of Astronautics, Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering and Executive Director of USC’s Systems Architecting and Engineering Program in the Viterbi School of Engineering. He is also the founding Director of the Distributed Autonomy and Intelligent Systems Laboratory at USC. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the recipient of the NAE’s 2023 Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education. He is also a Life Fellow of IEEE and recipient of the 2023 IEEE Simon Ramo Medal. In 2020, he received the IEEESMC’s Norbert Wiener Outstanding Research Award. His other systems engineering awards include the 2021 Joint ASEE SED/INCOSE Outstanding Systems Engineering Educator Award, the 2011 INCOSE PioneerAward, the 2019 IEEE AESS Pioneer Award, and the 2020 NDIA Ferguson Award. He is the recipient of the 2023 ASME CIE Lifetime Achievement Award and is Honorary Member of ASME. He is the author of Transdisciplinary Systems Engineering: Exploiting Convergence in a Hyperconnected World (Springer, 2018). He is the Co-Editor-in-Chief with Norm Augustine of the Handbook of Model Based Systems Engineering (Springer, 2023). He serves on the Advisory Board of the London Digital Twin Research Centre and is a faculty affiliate of USC’s Ginsberg Institute of Biomedical Therapeutics. He is a Life Fellow/Fellow of ten different science and engineering societies including IEEE, INCOSE, IISE, AIAA, and AAAS. His research interests are digital twin-enabled MBSE, augmented intelligence applications in systems engineering, and transdisciplinary engineering education. He has served as Principal Investigator on 98 R&D contracts and grants totalling more than ＄100M. He received his Ph.D., M.S., and B.S. degrees in Engineering from UCLA

Steven Hoffenson is the Director of Data Science at Endevor, an enterprise software company that focuses on process automation for asset-intensive industries. Prior to joining Endevor, Dr. Hoffenson spent 15 years as an academic researcher and professor, where he published over 65 peer-reviewed manuscripts focused on product development, systems engineering, sustainability, and numerical optimization. His most recent academic position was in the School of Systems and Enterprises at Stevens Institute of Technology, where he directed the Design of Sustainable Products Across Complex Environments (Design SPACE) Laboratory. Dr. Hoffenson holds degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan (Ph.D. and M.S.E.) and the University of Maryland (B.S.).

Lu Xiao is an Assistant Professor in the School of Systems and Enterprises at Stevens Institute of Technology. Her research interests lie in the broad area of software engineering, particularly in software architecture, software economics, cost estimation, and software ecosystems. She is an awardee of NSF CAREER project in 2021. She has published her work in different conferences and journals, including TSE, ICSE, FSE, and ICSA, etc.. She completed her PhD in Computer Science at Drexel University in 2016. She received the first-place prize at the ACM Student Research Competition in 2015.