Effect of multidisciplinary engineering on university courses

One of the main challenges at definition methodology, planning, and configuration of an engineering course is recent dramatic change of engineering methodology at leading industrial industries. Engineering systems are applied to integrate all engineering activities for entire lifecycle of industrial products. At the same time, engineering was tailored to multidisciplinary structure of recent product components and units. This change demanded shifting product definition to higher level of abstraction. Increased knowledge content at development and operation of products required integration of research activities into product development process. This new situation is advantageous for university programs because it needs more abstract and research oriented practice at education and improves level and scientific content of courses. Authors of this paper published their former relevant results in modeling of internet-based engineering courses, as well as in new challenges at engineering education and course programs. In this paper, first the new situation at leading industrial engineering is outlined. Following this, connections and relations are revealed between the changed engineering and the future anticipated university course activities. Finally, effects on university courses are defined which are aimed as contribution to modeling and development of future university engineering programs.