Löwen’s aim is to provide a framework for work on plant and infrastructure projects. “This allows us to support systems engineering tasks with high-performance software tools or to learn how we can best modularize trains or power plants,” he says. According to this Siemens expert, his discipline involves the shaping of processes and methods. Even though Löwen has been working in this area for several decades, he is convinced that “the main benefits of systems engineering are still to come. Now that we understand which processes and methods are generally valid, we can give systems engineering another boost. This means, among other things, that all of the relevant information is contained in digitized models that are used throughout the entire life cycle, from the original idea to the dismantling of the facility or infrastructure in question.”

Löwen was already a pioneer back in his college days. “Computer science was still a new subject when I began studying it at Dortmund University in 1981, along with only about 60 other college freshmen,” he says. However, the number of students majoring in this subject sky-rocketed just one year later. After earning his Ph.D., Löwen worked at Siemens in Erlangen on diagnostic systems for high-voltage networks. If a fault appears in the networks, the diagnostic systems effectively analyze the resulting flood of messages so that the cause can be pinpointed. “After Siemens decided to use such expert systems on an increasingly wide scale, I decided to switch to Corporate Technology in 1991 because I wanted to address the topic in an inter-disciplinary manner,” he says.

Soon after that, he also began to model industrial facilities in computer simulations. The simulation helped Siemens discuss various possible solutions with customers as early as the bidding stage so that facilities wouldn’t have to be extensively redesigned later because the framework conditions had been insufficiently clarified. The model his team developed for drinking water networks is still used today. In 1999 Löwen became head of the System Engineering competence center, which primarily focused on interdisciplinary concepts and methods. Today Löwen is responsible for creating new systems engineering strategies – not only at Siemens, but also as a lecturer at several universities. “We will eventually have an active community for making the importance of systems engineering more widely known. I’m convinced that it will one day be a very important field of engineering,” Löwen says.