Chapter 2. System Science Principles (EN)
Systems science is an interdisciplinary field that studies the nature of systems (from simple to complex) in nature, society, cognition, engineering, technology and science itself. To systems scientists, the world can be understood as a system of systems. The field aims to develop interdisciplinary foundations that are applicable in a variety of areas, such as psychology, biology, medicine, communication, business management, technology, computer science, engineering, and social sciences.
The primitive aims of science are to explore and denote knowledge about the structures and functions of nature. Systems science is a discipline that studies the structures, mechanisms, behaviours, principles, properties, theories, and formal models of abstract systems and their applications in concrete systems in engineering and societies.
Systems are widely needed because the physical and/or cognitive power of an individual component or a person is always insufficient to carry out a task or solving a problem. The systems philosophy is an important and the most general scientific philosophy that intends to treat everything as a system where it perceives that a system always belongs to other supersystem(s) and contains more subsystems.
System science will be further developed in Volume 5.
The systems science principles are provided below:
- Systemness – the world is composed of systems of systems
- Systems are organized in structural and functional hierarchies
- Systems can be represented as abstract networks of relations between components
- Systems are dynamic processes on one or more-time scales
- Systems exhibit various kinds and levels of complexity
- Auto-Organization is a dynamic process of making and breaking interconnections
- Systems can encode knowledge, receive and send information and learn
- Systems develop internal regulations to achieve stability
- Systems can contain models of other systems or of themselves
- Systems can be understood (a corollary of #9) – Science as the building of models
- Systems can be improved (a corollary of #6) – Evolutionary processthat can be used to discover new aspects
Systems Science Strategies are shared below:
- Observe models of specific systems, e.g. biological or social systems
- Use analytical methods to find commonalities on how systems function and evolve
- Develop languages that can describe all systems regardless of specific domains
- Develop general principles that provide explanations regardless of the details
- Develop mathematical descriptions that can be used to discover new aspects