Engineering informatics

Engineering Informatics is an engineering discipline combining information technology (IT) – or informatics – with engineering concepts; It is an interdisciplinary scientific area focusing on the application of advanced computing, information and communication technologies to engineering; The study of use of information and the design of information structures that facilitate the practice of engineering and of designed artifacts that embody and embed information technology and science to achieve social, economic and environmental goals. Given this perspective, the rest of the introduction identifies different strands of concepts that inform and support the evolution of engineering informatics as a distinct discipline that lives at the interface between engineering and informatics, in the same vein as bioinformatics, geoinformatics, medical informatics, and other applied disciplines.

Computer-aided design (CAD), intelligent CAD, engineering analysis, collaborative design support, computer-aided engineering, and product life-cycle management are some of the terms that have emerged over the past decades of computing in engineering. Codification and automation of engineering knowledge and methods have had major impact on engineering practice. The use of computers by engineers has consistently tracked advancements in computer and information sciences. Computing, algorithms, computational methods, and engineering have increasingly intertwined themselves as developments in theory and practice in both disciplines influence each other. Therefore, it is now time to begin using the term “engineering informatics” to cover the science of the information that flows through these processes.

Informatics, with origins in the German word "Informatik" referring to automated information processing, has evolved to its current broad definition. The rise of the term informatics can be attributed to the breadth of disciplines that are now accepted and envisioned as contributing to the field of computing and information sciences. A common definition of informatics adopted by many departments/schools of informatics comes from the University of Edinburgh: "the study of the structure, behavior, and interactions of natural and artificial computational systems that store, process and communicate information.” Informatics includes the science of information, the practice of information processing, and the engineering of information systems.

The history of engineering and computers shows a trend of increasing sophistication in the type of engineering problems being solved. Early CAD was primarily geometry driven (using mathematics and computer science). Then came the engineering use of AI, driven by theories of cognitive science and computational models of cognition (logic and pattern based). More recently, models of collaboration and representation and acquisition of collective knowledge have been introduced, driven by fields of social sciences (ethnography, sociology of work) and philosophy.

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