Designing Complex Systems

Without standardized construction elements such as nuts, bolts, bearings, beams, resistors and the like, the design of physical equipment is hopelessly inefficient, and engineers are continually bogged down with re-designing these elements over and over again. The same can be said for the domain of ideas and performance requirements. Only through a process of standardization of the corresponding functional elements will systems engineering truly live up to its potential of increased efficiency and quality. Designing Complex Systems: Foundations of Design in the Functional Domain introduces students and practitioners in the field of system design to a particular methodology that addresses design issues in a rigorous and consistent top-down fashion. It also reassesses the characteristics of engineering and its place within the field of intellectual activity, in particular, examining the creative aspects of design as reflected in the difference between engineers and technicians. Erik W. Aslaksen brings forty years of experience to the table with this groundbreaking work. He examines how the concept of value can provide a quantitative measure of that wider interaction of the engineered object with its environment. With its forward-looking approach and holistic perspective, this volume is sure to advance the field of knowledge of systems engineering for years to come.

The world we live in is increasingly complex. It throws up complex problems. This book is about tackling them. At ThinkPlace, we’ve pioneered the application of design thinking to complex challenges like climate change, family violence and global malnutrition. We work globally with governments, organisations and communities using a methodology – the Design SystemTM outlined in this book – that has been developed over more than a decade. We bring together different voices and help them to create better futures. If you’re one of those voices, or would like to be, this book is for you. It’s part roadmap, part instruction manual, but mostly it’s a clarion call for a new way of doing things: tackling the world’s biggest problems in a way that brings people together and produces positive, lasting change.

Design Journeys for Complex Systems is a designer's handbook to learn systemic design tools to engage stakeholder groups in collaborative design to address complex societal systems. Systemic design uses systems thinking and service design to address large-scale societal contexts and complex socio-technical systems. These are contexts characterized by social and technological complexity, high uncertainty, and often problematic outcomes. Using a tour guide metaphor, the book trains people's mindsets and provides tools for dealing with hyper complexity, to enable understanding of systemic problems, and to build capacity to collaborate in teams to produce action proposals.

Many complex systems found in nature can be viewed as function optimizers. In particular, they can be viewed as such optimizers of functions in extremely high dimensional spaces. Given the difficulty of performing such high-dimensional op timization with modern computers, there has been a lot of exploration of computa tional algorithms that try to emulate those naturally-occurring function optimizers. Examples include simulated annealing (SA [15,18]), genetic algorithms (GAs) and evolutionary computation [2,3,9,11,20-22,24,28]. The ultimate goal of this work is an algorithm that can, for any provided high-dimensional function, come close to extremizing that function. Particularly desirable would be such an algorithm that works in an adaptive and robust manner, without any explicit knowledge of the form of the function being optimized. In particular, such an algorithm could be used for distributed adaptive control---one of the most important tasks engineers will face in the future, when the systems they design will be massively distributed and horribly messy congeries ofcomputational systems.

This book contains all refereed papers accepted during the ninth edition of the conference that took place at the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris on December 18-19, 2018. Mastering complex systems requires an integrated understanding of industrial practices as well as sophisticated theoretical techniques and tools. This explains the creation of an annual go-between forum in Paris dedicated to academic researchers & industrial actors working on complex industrial systems architecture, modeling & engineering. These proceedings cover the most recent trends in the emerging field of Complex Systems, both from an academic and a professional perspective. A special focus is put on “Products & services development in a digital world”. The CSD&M Paris 2018 conference is organized under the guidance of CESAM Community (http://cesam.community/en). CESAM Community has been developed since 2010 by the non-profit organization CESAMES Association to organize the sharing of good practices in Enterprise and Systems Architecture and to certify the level of knowledge and proficiency in this field through CESAM certification.

This book sheds light on the large-scale engineering systems that shape and guide our everyday lives. It does this by bringing together the latest research and practice defining the emerging field of Complex Engineered Systems. Understanding, designing, building and controlling such complex systems is going to be a central challenge for engineers in the coming decades. This book is a step toward addressing that challenge.

This book looks at how to design complex products that have many components with intricate relationships and requirements. It also discusses how to manage processes involved in their lifecycle, from concept generation to disposal, with the objectives of increasing customer satisfaction, quality, safety, and usability and meeting program timings and budgets. Part I covers systems engineering concepts, issues, and bases in product design. Part II examines quality, human factors, and safety engineering approaches. Part III describes important tools and methods used in these fields, and Part IV includes other relevant integration topics, interesting applications of useful techniques, and observations from a few "landmark" product development case studies.

This book contains all refereed papers that were accepted to the third edition of the « Complex Systems Design & Management » (CSD&M 2012) international conference that took place in Paris (France) from December 12-14, 2012. (Website: http://www.csdm2012.csdm.fr) These proceedings cover the most recent trends in the emerging field of complex systems sciences & practices from an industrial and academic perspective, including the main industrial domains (transport, defense & security, electronics, energy & environment, e-services), scientific & technical topics (systems fundamentals, systems architecture& engineering, systems metrics & quality, systemic tools) and system types (transportation systems, embedded systems, software & information systems, systems of systems, artificial ecosystems). The CSD&M 2012 conference is organized under the guidance of the CESAMES non-profit organization (http://www.cesames.net).