System Architecture and Complexity

Preface

This book has a long history!

Over the course of our respective experience, we were convinced of the requirement to allocate importance to teaching a new genre that has accompanied the development of IT, and IT systems, since their creation. The milestones of this evolution can be summarized in a few titles: Industrials Dynamics and Principles of Systems by J. Forrester, Sciences of the Artificial by H. Simon, and the series by G. Weinberg, Quality Software Management, Volume 1: Systems Thinking (or even its Introduction to General Systems Thinking), accompanied by three other volumes. Perhaps also the three volumes by J. Martin, Information Engineering.

In the 1990s, there was a major event whose overwhelming effect on our system of thinking has perhaps never been measured completely: IT definitively ceases to be included as a centralized system around a “large” mainframe controller, to become a distributed system, an assembly of “clients” and “servers” that provide mutual services to each other and that must, however, be integrated. There is no “center” in the vulgar meaning of the term, or rather, the center is everywhere; everything interacts. Machines that will soon be hand-held are infiltrating and infusing into society as a whole, in all fields. The challenge is expressed in two words: parallelism and integration, notwithstanding a quality of service connected to the diffusion of technology and the risk associated with use.

In this context, under the instigation ...