The unified approach to the engineering of measurement systems for test and evaluation-a brief survey

Over the last two to three decades there has been an increased recognition in industrial and governmental organizations that the educational establishment is not producing engineers who are measurement-aware, measurement-conscious or measurement-oriented. The need is especially acute in the Measurement for Test and Evaluation community. Numerous national and international conferences have discussed ways of remedying the situation by organizing or re-organizing curricula. The author has participated in a number of those. The common consensus is that it is only a matter of selecting a menu of lectures and courses from among existing ones to achieve this aim. It has not been generally recognized that there exists a basic core of knowledge which is unique to the discipline of the Engineering of Measurement Systems, especially for Test and Evaluation and shared by no other discipline, and that this body of knowledge must form the skeleton to which contributions from other disciplines can be attached as necessary. This skeleton is missing from all existing proposals. The author has developed this "Unified Approach" for the past 40 years to the point where the Engineering of Measurement Systems can stand alone as its own discipline, self-contained, with a whole set of new concepts not previously existing, which unify the thousands of transducers/sensors and signal conditioning which exist in all disciplines, into a single, systematic, logical and cohesive body of knowledge. There are over 15 such sets of new concepts, all critically important to this new approach. The author describes several of these and presents their distilled essence.