Systems Engineering in the Fourth Industrial Revolution

22Modeling the Evolution of Technologies

Yair Shai

Synopsis

Technologies never seem to cease changing and developing at an increasingly growing rate. System engineers have been challenged by this trend which affects advanced manufacturing and Industry 4.0 challenges. This chapter presents a holistic approach as the basis for scientific and engineering modeling. The holistic approach recognizes that new properties and behaviors emerge when broadening the perspective and obtaining a macroscopic observation. Holism (from Greek λος, holos, a word meaning all, whole, entire, total) is the idea that “high‐level” properties of a system, whether physical, technical, biological, chemical, social, economic, etc., cannot be satisfactorily determined, explained, and described in an inductive fashion, i.e. from an inductive reasoning that makes generalizations based on the behavior of the “individuals” (component parts). In contrast, a deductive “holistic” reasoning determines how the particular system of interest behaves and performs. Again, this also applies to advanced manufacturing systems and their related supply chains. It is the system as a whole that determines the way its parts behave or perform, not the other way around. The term holism was coined by Jan Smuts in 1927 as a concept that regards objects, both animate and inanimate, as “wholes” and not merely as assemblages of elements ...