Civil Systems

The focus of Berkeley's Civil Systems program is the emerging complexity in civilian systems such as workflow networks, smart buildings, unmanned air vehicles, biofilms, infrastructure security, organic disaster management networks, and sustainable eco-systems.

Such systems often have a "personality" that cannot be perfectly predicted from an analysis of their parts. This is often true for the large systems that form the infrastructure of our society, but it is also true of much smaller systems we design, build and use every day. The elements comprising a system can include the following:

• hardware (structures, equipment, facilities)
• software and procedures (formal, informal)
• environments (ecological, biological, physical, computational)
• people
• organizations (social, political, financial)
• interfaces among the preceding.

Berkeley's Civil Systems Program

Our program educates leaders and professionals who will be able to design, build, manage, operate and implement systems (large and small) that behave as desired, achieving their intended performance goals efficiently and without surprises.

Our degree programs have a unique "signature" that is a blend of technology, modeling, and societal studies that cannot be imparted by other departments. Our flexible degree programs encompass areas normally considered beyond the scope of CEE. To find out more about our unique signature, see the Civil Systems Manifesto.