Sensitivity models: a holistic approach in engineering education

This paper refers to some other papers of the authors published in former years. One of the key competencies that have been mentioned there is the capability of systemic thinking. This key competency is necessary for each engineer because today he/she has to deal with very complex situations. Even design engineers have to consider various dependencies and influences and the impact their development has on other things. During the last few decades, the systems approach has been brought to different fields of science. This led to the development of methods and tools to analyse a system and to predict its behaviour. If one has understood what systemic thinking means, these methods are often very easy to understand. We team oriented systemic approach is integrated into a lot of lectures and seminars at the Mannheim University of Applied Sciences. The students learn to use a procedure to build a so-called sensitivity model with the relevant and essential system variables. Those variables are derived from the METEOR general enterprise model. After this, the interdependencies between the variables are examined. The result is the sensitivity model of a complex system that allows the simulation of scenarios and the checking of any interference.