Human Life System Engineering: Definition, Scope, Theoretical Foundations, and Research Framework

Modern individual life has increasingly become a complex, long-term, cross-domain, and multi-objective system. Issues such as learning, career development, family, wealth, health, relationships, and retirement can no longer be understood in isolation. Instead, they interact with one another, generate feedback, and jointly influence life quality, life security, and the realization of life value throughout the individual life cycle. Traditional life planning, career counseling, psychological counseling, wealth management, and health management have each played important roles within their respective domains. However, due to the lack of an integrated theoretical framework capable of connecting life goals, system structure, resource allocation, risk management, feedback adjustment, and long-term evolution, these approaches often struggle to address the overall complexity of modern human life. This paper proposes Human Life System Engineering (HLSE) as an emerging interdisciplinary field and systematically discusses its definition, research object, scope, disciplinary boundaries, theoretical foundations, methodological system, core framework, and application value. HLSE is defined as an integrated discipline that applies systems engineering, systems science, cybernetics, decision science, life-cycle management, modeling methods, and artificial intelligence technologies to model, design, optimize, and govern the goals, structures, processes, resources, risks, feedback mechanisms, and evolution of individual human life systems. Its core purpose is not to mechanize human life, nor to replace human freedom of choice with engineering methods. Rather, while respecting human subjectivity, emotional complexity, and value diversity, it introduces systematic, structured, model-based, and closed-loop governance methods to help individuals better understand, design, manage, and realize the value of their lives. This paper proposes four foundational frameworks of HLSE: the six-subsystem framework, including the learning system, career system, family system, wealth system, health system, and relationship system; the four-dimensional spiral growth framework, including self-awareness, life planning, self-cultivation, and life value; the closed-loop governance framework, including goal setting, action execution, state monitoring, feedback analysis, and strategy adjustment; and the life-cycle framework, which analyzes the tasks, resources, risks, and optimization priorities of different life stages. The paper further argues that HLSE can provide a unified theoretical foundation for life planning education, career development counseling, family system design, wealth and retirement planning, long-term health governance, and AI-driven life system platforms.