In recent years, product complexity has increased exponentially in all fields of engineering in order to improve features and functions of existing products (e.g., the growing use of electronics in the automotive field) or to create innovative products (smartphones, autonomous aircraft, smart materials, etc.). Traditional education, based on strong disciplinary specialization, does not allow it to respond to the needs of a production system in which products and services with higher added value are characterized by strong interaction between skills that were until recently disjointed. All this has had an impact on how products and services are researched, developed and analyzed, with the emergence of completely different approaches to design, such as Concurrent Design and Muldidisciplinary Design Optimization, which have revolutionized the entire product and service development chain.
The expertise within the PhD Committee, the contacts with the productive realities of the area, and the numerous national and international collaborations with research institutions and companies enable the PhD Committee to address multiple complex functional, design and production problems on which doctoral and post-doctoral students will be called upon to grapple in advanced application contexts.

The Course develops the skills needed to manage the increasing level of complexity in the design, development and analysis procedures of modern products, systems and services, which no longer arise from the juxtaposition of knowledge, but from the interaction of even very different technical-scientific cultures in multidisciplinary fields. Highly qualified personnel are thus trained, with a solid background in different branches of engineering and basic sciences and a clear understanding of problems related to scientific and technological innovation. During the three-year doctoral program, students take general and applied courses; they carry out autonomous research, dropped into inter- and multi-disciplinary fields, maturing individual skills to be spent in articulated and complex contexts for the development of original solutions with a high rate of technological innovation.
The Course’s educational offerings complement those of the Doctoral School of the University of Salento, which covers improvements in doctoral students’ language and computer skills, training on intellectual property and fund raising, with specific courses and seminars.

The Doctoral Program in Complex Systems Engineering includes grants funded through the PNNR. The scientific topics covered within the Doctoral Program in Complex Systems Engineering are by their nature fully consistent with the pivotal principles of the PNRR and are optimally matched with the overall strategy and the PNRR Component Detail Sheet.
The scientific and technological development issues addressed within the PhD have innovation and sustainability as their cornerstones, declined within the possible mutual interactions of the Complex Systems and their spillovers not only from the point of view of science and technological evolution, but also of social sustainability and economic development of the territory and can be framed within the following PNRR objectives: Green Transition; Digital Transformation; Smart, Sustainable and Inclusive Growth.
Based on the well-established assumption that the development of advanced technology requires multiple scientific and technological competencies to build an enabling value chain and that the harmonious integration of knowledge gathers scientific and technological innovation, the PhD in Complex Systems Engineering possesses the characteristics of innovativeness and multi-disciplinarity such that it is a privileged training pathway for the creation of professional figures of the highest level. The professional trained by the educational pathway of this doctorate has skills and knowledge that place him or her in a working scenario in the field of very high innovativeness on aggregates of capabilities and on problems that require multidisciplinary knowledge, particularly in the areas of Key Enabling Technologies.

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