1.1 What is a System?
A system is a set of elements so interconnected as to aid in driving toward a defined goal. There are three operative parts to this short definition. First is the existence of a set of elements—that is, a group of objects with some characteristics in common. All the passengers who have flown in a Boeing 787 or all the books written on systems engineering form a set, but mere membership in a definable set is not sufficient to form a system according to our definition. Second, the objects must be interconnected or influence one another. The members of a football team then would qualify as a system because each individual's performance influences the other members. See Ackoff (1971) for an interesting taxonomy of systems concepts (also see Whitehead et al., 2014).
Finally, the interconnected elements must have been formed to achieve some defined goal or objective. A random collection of people or things, even if they are in close proximity and thus influence each other in some sense, would not for this reason form a meaningful system. A football team meets this third condition of purposefulness, because it seeks a common goal. While these three components of our working definition fit within American Heritage's definitions, we should note that we are restricting our attention to “goal-directed” or purposeful systems, and thus our use of the term is narrower than a layman's intuition might indicate.1
It must be possible to estimate how well a system is doing in its drive toward the goal, or how closely one design option or another approaches the ideal—that is, more or less closely achieves the goal. We call this measure of progress or achievement the Index of Performance (IP) (alternatively, Measures of Effectiveness [MOE], Performance Measures [PM], etc.). Proper choice of an Index of Performance is crucial in successful system design. A measurable and meaningful measure of performance is simple enough in concept, although one sometimes has difficulty in conveying its importance to a client. It is typically complex and challenging in practice, however, to establish an index that is both measurable and meaningful. The temptation is to count what can be counted if what really matters seems indefinable. Much justifiable criticism has been directed at system analysts in this regard (Hoos, 1972; Syme et al., 2011). The Index of Performance concept is discussed in detail in Section 2.3.
Our definition of a system permits components, or the entire system in fact, to be of living form. The complexity of biological systems and social systems is such that complete mathematical descriptions are difficult, or impossible, with our present state of knowledge. We must content ourselves in such a situation with statistical or qualitative descriptions of the influence of elements one on another, rather than complete analytic and explicit functional relationships. This presents obvious objective obstacles, as well as more subtle subjective difficulties. It requires maturity by the system team members to work across disciplinary boundaries toward a common goal when their disciplinary methodologies are different not only in detail but in kind.
From these efforts at definition, we are forced to conclude that the words “system,” “subsystem,” and “parameter” do not have an objective meaning, independent of context. The electric utility of a region, for example, could be a system, or a subsystem, or could establish the value of a parameter depending on the observer's point of view of the situation. An engineer for the Detroit Edison Company (DTE Energy) could think of his electric utility as a system. Yet, he would readily admit that it is a subsystem in the Michigan Electric Coordinated System (MECS), which in turn is connected to the power pool covering the northeastern portion of the United States and eastern Canada. On the other hand, the city planner can ignore the system aspect of Detroit Edison and think of it merely supplying energy at a certain dollar cost. This is so if it is reasonable for him to assume that electricity can be provided in any reasonable amount to any point within the region. In this sense, the cost of electricity is a regional parameter. The massive Northeast U.S. power failure in 2003, along with the resulting repercussions directly affecting over 50 million people, clearly illustrates the regional nature of these systems.
That the function of an object and its relationship to neighboring objects depends on the observer's viewpoint must not be considered unusual. Koestler, for example, argues persuasively that this is true for all organisms as well as social organizations. For these units, which we have called “systems,” he coins the term “holon.”
But “wholes” and “parts” in this absolute sense just do not exist anywhere, either in the domain of living organisms or of social organizations. What we find are intermediate structures or a series of levels in an ascending order of complexity: sub-wholes which display, according to the way you look at them, some of the characteristics commonly attributed to wholes and some of the characteristics commonly attributed to parts.…The members of a hierarchy, like the Roman god Janus, all have two faces looking in opposite directions: the face turned toward the subordinate levels is that of a self-contained whole; the face turned upward toward the apex, that of a dependent part. One is the face of the master, the other the face of the servant. This “Janus effect” is a fundamental characteristic of sub-wholes in all types of hierarchies.
(Koestler, 1971)
This issue is further confused by the recent extensive use of the term “system-of-systems” or SoS, which refers to s...
