The European Space Agency (Directorate of Technology, Engineering and Quality and Concurrent Design Facility) is organising the 9th International Systems & Concurrent Engineering for Space Applications Conference at on 30 September, 1-2 October 2020.

Held on a biannual basis, the Conference aims to foster networking and exchange of ideas, experiences, lessons learned and future trends in the area of Systems and Concurrent Engineering (SE&CE), for agencies, companies, organizations, universities and institutes involved in space and related activities.

The first two editions of the Concurrent Engineering Workshops (CEW) were held at ESTEC in 2004 and 2006, focussing on the novelties of the early Concurrent Engineering design centres, methodology and applications.

In 2008 the Workshop objectives were expanded to the vast field of Systems Engineering (SE), and the event was named SECESA: “Systems Engineering and Concurrent Engineering for Space Applications”.

Since then, SECESA has been hosted at different European University premises, and co-organised by academia chosen via a formal selection process.
This approach enables the Universities to showcase specific areas or projects where students are excelling at utilising SE and CE approaches as well as accomplishing the Agency educational objective of inspiring young generations of engineers with new methodology and approaches for Systems Engineering by facilitating their participation to the technical sessions.

• La Sapienza University of Rome, in Italy, hosted SECESA 2008
• Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), in Switzerland, hosted SECESA 2010
• Instituto Superior Tecnico (IST), in Lisbon (Portugal), hosted SECESA 2012
• Institute of Space Systems (IRS) of the University of Stuttgart, in Germany, hosted SECESA 2014
• Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería Aeronáutica y del Espacio (ETSIAE) of Madrid, Spain, hosted SECESA 2016
• Strathclyde University, Glasgow, in UK, hosted SECESA 2018.