Systematic Decision-Making in Civil Engineering

Abstract

Civil engineering is a creative profession. The role of the civil engineer is essentially one of synthesis, planning and designing, moulding and shaping the domestic and industrial environment. In order to create and synthesise, civil engineers must be fully aware of how the materials they use and the artefacts they build will behave under working conditions. The education of a civil engineer is consequently much dominated by learning how things behave and how that behaviour may be determined by analysis. Knowledge of disciplines such as structural mechanics, hydromechanics, soil mechanics and their associated analysis techniques is an essential prerequisite for a civil engineer. Essential though a knowledge of analysis is, however, it is a mistake to think that civil engineering is an analytically dominated profession. Quite the opposite is true: analysis is important only as an adjunct of the process of synthesis.