Engineering is the application of the technical, scientific and mathematical competences to solve problems. In exida, an Engineer is a person able to understand the problem to find the best - practical and cost effective - solution. There are plenty of fields of Engineering, depending on the specific context of application of this ability; exida offers you the following:
System Engineering
A system is an assembly of parts or elements - mechanical, electrical, software, ... - that combined provide a function not obtainable from individual parts. Therefore, an engineered system is defined as a combination of components that work in synergy to collectively execute an intended/expected function. Thus, it can be said that the Systems Engineering overlaps the specific engineering fields, such as mechanical engineering, hardware engineering, software engineering, electrical engineering, and so on, because it must ensure that all the more specific aspects are considered and integrated into a whole system, and a Systems Engineer must be able to imagine, understand, design, integrate, and handle these complex systems throughout their life cycles.
The Systems Engineering process is, first of all, voted to discover the real problems that could happen, identifying the most probable failures, or those failures with the highest impact, and finding the best solutions.
Control Engineering
Control Systems Engineering is a discipline that applies control theory to design systems with desired behaviours in control environments. This practice uses sensors and detectors to measure the output performance of the process being controlled; these measurements are used to provide corrective feedback helping to achieve the desired performance. Systems designed to perform without requiring human input are called automatic control systems (such as cruise control for regulating the speed of a car). Multi-disciplinary in nature, control systems engineering activities focus on the implementation of control systems mainly derived from mathematical modelling of a diverse range of systems.
Reliability Engineering
The Reliability plays a key role in a cost-effective product realization (system development or equipment production).
Reliability engineering is a specific part of systems engineering, focused on the ability of a product to work without failure, under given conditions and for a given period of time. In fact, to define the Reliability function R(t), means to estimate the probability of success as at “t” time. This estimation is commonly based on the execution of reliability testing sessions, but could also be based on the analysis of the data sets, collected from previous experiences. In the Reliability context the probability of success at a time is defined as Availability, so that sometimes Availability is used as a synonym of Reliability. Reliability engineering relates closely to the Functional Safety engineering, in that they use common analysis methods (FMEDA first) and may require input from each other. It is commonly said that a product shall be “reliable and safe”.
Reliability is also strictly related to the Quality but, while Quality focuses on the prevention of defects during the development/production phase, Reliability is committed to prevent the failures over all the product useful lifetime, from commissioning to decommissioning, through operation. At the end, we can see that it is reasonable to expect that a product with a high/good level of Quality has, as well, a high/good level of Reliability.
