Engineering Intelligent Systems

2We Live in a World of Systems

There exist models, principles, and laws that apply to generalized systems or their subclasses, irrespective of their particular kind, the nature of their component elements, and the relation or ‘forces’ between them. It seems legitimate to ask for a theory, not of systems of a more or less special kind, but of universal principles applying to systems in general. In this way we postulate a new discipline called General System Theory. Its subject matter is the formulation and derivation of those principles which are valid for ‘systems’ in general.

(General System Theory, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, 1951)

We live in a world of systems. The term system, which came to us from the Latin and Greek, systema, meaning an organized whole, consisting of parts, has become popular as a way to describe the increasingly complex world we experience. Perhaps not surprisingly, our current concept of systems came from a biologist, Ludwig von Bertalanffy who in the 1950s and 1960s generalized what he saw by studying plants and animals into a general theory of systems. His idea was that systems of all kinds – whether created by Mother Nature or designed and built by human beings, share certain important characteristics, which both identify them as systems, and also point us toward a greater understanding of how they work and what they accomplish. In this chapter, we aim at developing an intuition for systems – how to identify them, describe them, think about them, and ...