The New Era of Network Engineering

Telecom session – introduction

Alberto Calero (France Telecom Spain) – The New Era of Network Engineering

Engineering is the discipline, art, skill and profession of acquiring and applying scientific, mathematical, economic, social, and practical knowledge to design and build structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes that safely realize improvements to the lives of people.

In the last decade we have discovered and even triggered the fact that all these structures, machines, devices, systems, materials, processes, living entities, have a profound common architecture based on the interconnection of their elements that revolutionize the implementation of practical implementations with them. The New Network Engineering appears as a new discipline that applies all the new network knowledge to practical implementations in industry. It is a multidisciplinary discipline with a strong mathematical foundation developed in the last decade.

The presentation will review some of the first practical implementations in the Telecommunication Industry with important impact in the cost and effectiveness of the marketing and customer support envelope of this industry and with important common elements to other sectors in the economy. It reflects how the age of the Network Engineering has arrived already and is a real, fast and effective source of transformation of Marketing, customer relationship, brand management, energy management, e-health, human organizations…

The review of real pioneering experiences in the last years as well as the newest initiatives in the industry will give an overview of how a new way of design has arrived to the engineering world. The presentation also presents the difference between the traditional customer data analytics and the new tools associated with Network Engineering that few organizations have in this days because they come from the Network Science research of the last decade where few research centers have lead the introduction of this new discipline.

Network Science tools are equivalent to CAD systems in the 80’s and the transformation that they brought to Mechanical Engineering, naval, aeronautical and electrical engineering that have transformed the world in the reality that we have today.

The next decade we will see a profound transformation of the engineering practice based on the macroscopic view of the behavior of systems and with the first generation of tools available for this new Engineering.