System Architecture and Complexity

Conclusion: The Three Principles of Systemics

This compendium assembles the three principle results presented in this book, in the form of three phenomenological principles in an analogy with phenomenological laws and/or principles of thermodynamics that determine all energy phenomena at all scales, whether micro, meso or macroscopic. The phenomena that we consider here are related to intra- and intersystem exchanges of information, and to the laws that govern these exchanges. Systems as we consider them here have two components: a physical component, on the one hand, obliged to comply with all the known constraints of the physical world, and an immaterial information component, on the other hand, which allows all energy processes that have been implemented by the system to be coordinated and controlled, including human processes, via the various languages that cover these exchanges.

These two components are in a complementary relationship like the one that exists in quantum mechanics. This complementarity was already taking shape in N. Wiener’s first works, with what he called communication and control. It is now, since the 1990s, an obvious truth that emerges from the engineering of systems of systems.

These two components also have the fundamental characteristics of having faults that are part of their very nature. Those in the physical world have been known to engineers for a long time, whereas those in an information world, a new world, have the particularity of resulting ...