Special Issue on "Engineering Informatics"

Computer-aided design CAD , intelligent CAD, engineering nalysis, collaborative design support, computer-aided engineerng, and product lifecycle management are some of the terms that ave emerged over the past 50 years of computing in engineering. odification and automation of engineering knowledge and methds have had major impact on engineering practice. The use of omputers by engineers has consistently tracked advancements in omputer and information sciences. Computing, algorithms, comutational methods, and engineering have increasingly intertwined hemselves as developments in theory and practice in both discilines influence each other. It is now time to begin using the term engineering informatics” to cover the science of the information hat flows through these processes. Informatics, with origins in the German word Informatik refering to automated information processing, has evolved to its curent broad definition. The rise of the term informatics can be atributed to the breadth of disciplines that are now accepted and nvisioned as contributing to the field of computing and informaion sciences. A common definition of informatics adopted by any departments/schools of informatics comes from the Univerity of Edinburgh: “the study of the structure, behaviour, and ineractions of natural and artificial computational systems that tore, process and communicate information.” Informatics inludes the science of information, the practice of information proessing, and the engineering of information systems. The history of engineering and computers shows a trend of ncreasing sophistication in the type of engineering problems beng solved. Early CAD was primarily geometry driven using athematics and computer science . Then came the engineering se of AI, driven by theories of cognitive science and computaional models of cognition logic and pattern based . More reently, models of collaboration and representation and acquisition f collective knowledge have been introduced, driven by fields of ocial sciences ethnography, sociology of work and philosophy. ollowing this history, the definition of engineering informatics an be taken as “the study of use of information and the design of nformation structures that facilitate the practice of engineering nd of designed artifacts that embody and embed information echnology and science to achieve social, economic and environental goals.” Given this perspective, the rest of the introduction dentifies different strands of concepts that inform and support the volution of engineering informatics as a distinct discipline that ives at the interface between engineering and informatics, in the ame vein as bioinformatics, medical informatics, and other aplied disciplines. Information is context specific and its engineering is an integral art of any exchange among people and machines. Thus, inforatics is the process of 1 creating and codifying the linguistic orlds representational structures represented by the object orlds in the relevant domain, and 2 managing the attendant eanings through their contexts of use and accumulation through ynthesis and classification. Engineering informatics is a reflective ask beyond the software/hardware that supports engineering; it is