AI4SE and SE4AI Exploration: A Decade Looking Back and Forward
Published in Preprint (arXiv:2606.19630), 2026
📌 Overview
AI4SE and SE4AI Exploration: A Decade Looking Back and Forward traces progress at the intersection of artificial intelligence and systems engineering (SE) across three phases—a foundational phase, an applied phase, and the current large language model (LLM) inflection phase.
Approach
The work performs a human–AI agreement literature review, assessing 1,712 INCOSE INSIGHT articles and 889 SERC publications with six AI models to characterize how the field has evolved and where it is heading. Accompanying data and a web application are shared to enable comparison and reproducibility.
Contributions
- A decade-long retrospective spanning the foundational, applied, and LLM-inflection phases of AI in SE.
- A large-scale human–AI agreement review across the INCOSE INSIGHT and SERC corpora using six AI models.
- Identification of five critical research gaps in AI4SE/SE4AI.
- Guidance for practitioners navigating AI adoption, assurance, and workforce transformation in systems engineering.
Preprint available on arXiv: arXiv:2606.19630.