| This research describes a longitudinal study and is about technology transfer from engineering to management. According to Kerlinger (1979), most practical management problems are formulated as engineering problems. So, it is legitimate to adapt general engineering techniques to solve those problems. Therefore, the objective of this research is twofold: (1) to establish the groundwork for a discipline of management systems engineering, and (2) to provide one example of its application.; A management system is any organizational position, its scope of authority, and its management tools. The Management System Model (MSM) describes a management system as the interaction between the manager, the operation, and the management tools (Kurstedt, Mendes, & Lee, 1988). Management systems engineering involves the specification, design, implementation and maintenance of management systems. The specification of a management system identifies the required performance characteristics in response to given events. The design is the prediction, with the aid of mathematical models, of the actual responses (outputs) to those events (inputs). The conceptual part of this research concerns the development of a mathematical model as a fundamental tool to specify and design engineering systems. The mathematical model is a control theory-based system estimator.; The applied part of this research draws upon an emergency exercise in an industrial plant. An emergency exercise is the live simulation of the response to a dangerous situation in an industrial setting. The management system is composed of the plant management, the industrial plant where a simulated accident occurs, and the management tools used during the emergency. The objective of the applied part is to show we can use a mathematical model to describe the dynamics of the emergency management system. The data to compare the model against is generated from information portrayed to the plant management during the unfolding of the exercise. The similarity between the model results and the data is apparent in graphical representations and verified through spectral cross-correlation.; Some significant contributions are the development of the conceptual framework, the demonstration of a quantitative analog for the MSM, and revitalizing the formal application of control theory to the study of management situations. |
