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System Architecture and Complexity
Systems of Systems Complexity Set
coordinated by
Jean-Pierre Briffaut
Volume 2
System Architecture
and Complexity
Contribution of Systems of
Systems to Systems Thinking
Jacques Printz
Foreword written by
Daniel Krob
First published 2020 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as
permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced,
stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers,
or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the
CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the
undermentioned address:
ISTE Ltd John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

27-37 St George’s Road 111 River Street
London SW19 4EU Hoboken, NJ 07030
UK USA
www.iste.co.uk www.wiley.com
© ISTE Ltd 2020

The rights of Jacques Printz to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020932472
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78630-561-9
Contents
Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
Part 1. The Foundations of Systemics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Introduction to Part 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Chapter 1. The Legacy of Norbert Wiener and the Birth

of Cybernetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.1. The birth of systemics: the facts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.1.1. The idea of integration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.1.2. Implementation and the first applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
1.2. Modeling for understanding: the computer science singularity . . . . . . . . . 21
1.3. Engineering in the 21st Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
1.4. Education: systemics at MIT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Chapter 2. At the Origins of System Sciences:

Communication and Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
2.1. A little systemic epistemology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
2.2. Systems sciences: elements of systemic phenomenology . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
2.2.1. Control/regulation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
2.2.2. Communication/information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
2.3. The means of existence of technical objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
vi System Architecture and Complexity
Chapter 3. The Definitions of Systemics: Integration

and Interoperability of Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
3.1. A few common definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
3.2. Elements of the system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
3.3. Interactions between the elements of the system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
3.4. Organization of the system: layered architectures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
3.4.1. Classification trees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
3.4.2. Meaning and notation: properties of classification trees . . . . . . . . . . . 74
Chapter 4. The System and its Invariants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

4.1. Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
4.2. Laws of conservation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
4.2.1. Invariance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
4.2.2. System safety: risks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
Chapter 5. Generations of Systems and the System

in the System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
5.1. System as a language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
5.2. The company as an integrated system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
5.2.1. The computer, driving force behind the information system . . . . . . . . 120
5.2.2. Digital companies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
Part 2. A World of Systems of Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
Introduction to Part 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
Chapter 6. The Problem of Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133

6.1. An open world: the transition from analog to all-digital . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
6.2. The world of real time systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
6.3. Enterprise architectures: the digital firm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
6.4. Systems of systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
Chapter 7. Dynamics of Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151

7.1. Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
7.2. Description of processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
7.2.1. Generalizing to simplify . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
7.2.2. Constructing and construction pathways . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
7.2.3. Evolution of processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
7.2.4. Antagonistic processes: forms of invariants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
7.3. Degenerative processes: faults, errors and “noise” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
Contents vii
7.4. Composition of processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176

7.4.1. Antagonistic interactions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
7.5. Energetics of processes and systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
Chapter 8. Interoperability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191

8.1. Means of systemic growth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
8.2. Dynamics of the growth of systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
8.2.1. The nature of interactions between systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200
8.2.2. Pre-eminence of the interaction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204
8.3. Limits of the growth of systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
8.3.1. Limits and limitations regarding energy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
8.3.2. Information energy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214
8.3.3. Limitations of external origin: PESTEL factors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216
8.4. Growth by cooperation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
8.4.1. The individuation stage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
8.4.2. The cooperation/integration stage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226
8.4.3. The opening stage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
Chapter 9. Fundamental Properties of Systems of Systems . . . . . . . . . 235

9.1. Semantic invariance: notion of a semantic map . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235
9.2. Recursive organization of the semantic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239
9.3. Laws of interoperability: control of errors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240
9.3.1. Models and metamodels of exchanges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
9.3.2. Organization “in layers” of the models and systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
9.3.3. Energy performance of the interaction between systems . . . . . . . . . . 245
9.3.4. Systemic approach to system safety . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247
9.4. Genealogy of systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257
List of Acronyms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275
Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277
Foreword
The systems that mankind structures and constructs are at the very heart of the
modern world: in fact, we only need to think of the social and political systems,
complex and industrial systems, monetary and financial systems, energy production
and distribution systems, transport systems, communication systems and, more
generally, the numerous organizational and technological systems that surround us
to realize that “engineered” systems1 are simply everywhere…
All these systems are becoming characterized more and more both by a very high
level of intrinsic complexity and by ever-increasing interdependences. Mastering
these systems has therefore become a real challenge, in a world that is undergoing
profound transformation where they must be able to resist the constant and often
contradictory pressure of citizens and consumers, markets and regulations,
competition and technological innovation, to cite just a few examples of forces that
they are subject to2 in almost all fields of industry and services where complex
systems play a role (aeronautical, automobile, digital, energy, civil engineering, high
tech, naval, railways, mines, spatial, information systems, etc.).
Mastering the complexity of a system fundamentally means being capable of

mastering its integration process – in other words, its construction by interconnection
and/or connection of smaller systems. This process certainly still remains largely
misunderstood insofar as it generates the mysterious phenomenon of emergence: an
1 Living systems are another story and we will limit the scope of our considerations to engineered
systems, in other words to artificial systems (as opposed to natural systems) architectured by
mankind. This already covers a vast spectrum given that technical systems and organizational
systems are both probably going to be included in this conceptual framework.
2 Not forgetting the intrinsic limits of our planet’s physical and environmental resources that
are impossible not to take into account.
x System Architecture and Complexity
integrated system will effectively always have new properties – known as “emerging”
properties – which cannot easily be obtained or expressed with its basic building
blocks.
To thoroughly understand this last concept, let us consider, as a simple example,

a wall that is only made of bricks (without mortar to bind them). A simple systemic
model of a brick can then be characterized by:
– functional behavior consisting, on the one hand, of providing reaction forces
when mechanical forces act on the brick and, on the other hand, of absorbing rays
of light;
– internal behavior provided by three invariant states: “length, width and height”.
In the composition of brick models like these, a wall will simply be a network of
bricks bound by the mechanical action/reaction forces. But a wall like this can
mechanically only have functional behavior consisting of absorbing rays of light.
However, it is clearly not the usual behavior of a wall, since the existing holes in the
walls (for windows) that must allow light to pass through must be taken into account!
We will also observe that it is difficult – and probably in vain – to attempt to express
the shape of a wall (which is one of its typical internal states) as a function of the
length, the width and the height of bricks that make it up. We are therefore obliged to
create a dedicated, more abstract, systemic model, to specifically model a wall when
we want to express its real properties. In systemic terms, this is expressed by observing
that the wall properties such as “allow light to pass through” or wall characteristics
such as its “shape” are properties and emerging characteristics for the wall, meaning
that they can only be observed at the scale of the “wall” system and not at the scale of
its “brick” sub-systems and that they therefore emerge from the integration process of
“brick” sub-systems which lead to the “wall” system. This mechanism of emergence is
in fact a universal characteristic of systems: every system always has emerging
properties in the way that we have just explained.
These considerations can appear to be logical, or even naive, but unfortunately

we can only observe in practice that their consequences are generally not
understood, which leads to numerous problems with quality and a lack of control
that is observed in numerous modern complex systems. Most engineers and
decision-makers effectively continue to think that control of the components of an
integrated system is sufficient to control the system overall. However, the very
nature of the integration mechanism requires not just directors to be in charge of
components when an integrated system needs to be designed: it is also essential to
entrust the high level integrative model for the system under consideration to a
specific director. This is the key role of a system architect, which unfortunately
often does not exist in most industrial organizations, as strange as this may seem for
anyone who is conscious of the underlying systemic fundamentals!
Foreword xi
Considering the integration of a heterogeneous complex system, the resultant of

the interaction of several homogeneous systems, necessarily requires transverse
reasoning, constructing models of a new type that capture the emergence by
coherently integrating the parts of each homogeneous model that constitutes an
overall systemic model. Yet it must be observed that nothing prepares us for this
new paradigm of systemic reasoning, which calls for bringing together different
expertise of extremely varied nature and to surpass traditional storage of the
organization of knowledge, although we have known for a long time3 that we cannot
optimize a system as a whole by optimizing each of its sub-systems.
The emergence of a true science of systems – systemics – that is capable of

rigorously tackling the numerous problems that are presented by the design and
management of the evolution of modern complex systems is therefore an urgent
requirement if we want to be able to bring satisfactory answers to the numerous,
profoundly systemic challenges that humanity is going to have to respond to at the
dawn of the third millenium. This emergence is, of course, not easy because it can
easily be understood that the development of systemics is confronted mechanically
by the set of classic disciplines that all attempt to provide part of the required
explanations for understanding the system and which therefore do not naturally
appreciate a new discipline attempting to encapsulate them in a holistic approach.
This book by Jacques Printz is therefore an extremely important contribution to

this newly emerged scientific and technical discipline: it is effectively primarily one
of the very rare “serious” books published and which provides a good introduction
to systemics. It effectively provides an extremely wide view of this field, picking up
a lead from system architecture in other words by the part of systemics that is
interested in the structure of systems and in their design processes, which allows
each and every one of us to understand the issues and the problems related to
systemics. We can therefore only encourage the reader to draw from the essence of
Jacques Printz’s master book which combines reminders of past development that
explain how systemics has emerged, an introduction to the key concepts of
systemics, and practical examples that allow the nature and scope of the ideas that
are presented to be wholly understood.
However, it will not be possible to easily cover the entire perimeter of systemics
because it is too broad a subject. Many other areas could in fact be subjects of other
books: system dynamics, system sizing and optimization, system evolution
trajectories, the design of homogeneous system families, agile and collaborative
approaches for system development, the governance of systems, etc. Readers who
3 This result is due to Richard E. Bellmann in an article on optimal control dating from 1952. He
showed that only the systems that can be optimized by parts are linear systems, a class to which
no complex system belongs in practice.
xii System Architecture and Complexity
wish to know more can, for example, benefit from the series of international
conferences “Complex Systems Design & Management” that the CESAMES
association organizes each year in Paris and every two years in Asia4 and which
allow the vital signs of the systemic approach applied to engineering of complex
systems to be regularly taken. The numerous conferences organized by the
international organization for systems engineering, INCOSE (International Council
on Systems Engineering), are also excellent places for more information about this
field, and meet the international community that is interested in these problems.
The universe of systems is in fact a “continent”5 that creates a true scientific and
technical field for a real science of systems. However, systemics still remains to be
constructed, necessarily in a profound interaction between theory and practice,
despite the awarness of great pionneers such as H. Simon and K.L. von Bertalanffy.
Unfortunately, there have not been many who have followed in their footsteps. Let
us hope therefore that the systemic challenges that the modern world has begun to
tackle are at last going to allow this to emerge.
Daniel KROB
Chairman
CESAMES (Centre d’excellence sur l’architecture, le management et l’économie
des systèmes – French Center of Excellence for Architecture, Management and
Economics of Systems, http://cesam.community/en/)
Paris
and
Professor
École Polytechnique
Paris
and
INCOSE Fellow
4 The conference “Complex Systems Design & Management Asia” was organized from 2014
to 2018 in Singapore. The 2020 edition of this conference is being organized in Beijing with
the support of the Chinese division of INCOSE and of the Chinese Aeronautical Federation.
5 Using an expression that Marcel Paul Schützenberger would probably not have denied.
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 of C. Rochet, who was in charge of a

training program for these new systems at the IGPDE1, the idea of proposing a
complete training cycle that gave great importance to this system thinking was born,
1 Institut de la gestion publique et du développement durable (French institute for public

management and economic development); permanent training operator of the Ministry for the
Economy and Finances and of the Ministry for Action and Public Accounts.
xiv System Architecture and Complexity
in association with the École Polytechnique and via the chair of Complex Systems
Engineering directed by Daniel Krob, with useful contributions from the CNAM.
A process of the same nature was developed at the Ministry of Defense via the DGA
(Direction générale de l’armement – French Directorate General of Armaments).
An original training program was created from this intense activity, indissociably
combining an essential conceptual contribution and an immediate implementation of
newly acquired concepts, all of which led to the training in systems architecture that
is currently provided by CESAMES Academy, a course with the RNCP2 label.
This book is the result of this past history and countless discussions, reports,
presentations, conferences, tests/errors, etc. that have accompanied it. Since the
observation drawn from the available literature in French, either the available works
were obsolete – dating from before the distribution revolution – or incomplete
and/or ill-suited because they were too qualitative and not integrated into a project
framework that would allow coordinated action between all the parties involved and
the engineering teams, which are themselves distributed.
To create systems that respond to the present and future requirements of the
users, we first need to “think” about complexity in a context that is precisely that
proposed in this book, hence its title and subtitle.
Jacques PRINTZ
February 2020
2 Répertoire national des certifications professionnelles – French national register of

professional certifications, see http://www.rncp.cncp.gouv.fr/.
PART 1
The Foundations of Systemics
System Architecture and Complexity: Contribution of Systems of Systems to

Systems Thinking, First Edition. Jacques Printz.
© ISTE Ltd 2020. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Introduction to Part 1
In this first part, we will focus on the most fundamental notions of systemic
analysis. They are threefold, summarized in a compendium in the conclusion to this
book. These three principles need to be considered as indissociable and distinct, but
I repeat, indissociable. Over and above the usual definitions that have been they are
encountered here and elsewhere, ever since systems became a talking point,
definitions are not strictly such because they no longer are purely descriptive.
Because of this, we are going to focus on a closely examine of what it means when
we say that a set of interacting entities can be described as a “system” – in other
words, how a system is constructed from its primitive elements and what
differentiates it from a simple group with no clearly defined objective.
This differentiation is the result of an operation, or an operator, in the

mathematical sense of the term, which today appears to be central to this problem:
having an integration operator means that a “sum” of disparate elements will appear
once the operation has been carried out as a unique entity, a unit, that only reveals its
newly created functional capacities via its external interfaces. To interact with it,
there is no need to know how it is made, but it is necessary to know what it is used
for and what its service contract is.
An entity that is an “integrated” system therefore has two aspects: (1) a

functional aspect, in a way logical and atemporal – “timeless” – which is more than
the sum of its parts, and (2) a solid physical aspect that allows the system to carry
out its functions in the material world, energetic, a temporalized and quantified
universe that is ours, without forgetting the “noise” of the environment. These two
aspects are in a complementary relationship: they are inseparable, although different.
4 System Architecture and Complexity
Once it is “integrated”, this new unit can in turn be input into the construction of
new units at a higher level, in a hierarchy of abstractions that are recursively
interwoven with each other. This is what is commonly known as a “system of
systems” which is coupled together more loosely than the constituent systems. This
type of system appeared in parallel with the miniaturization of computers, thanks to
technologies for integration of components that was perfected in the 1980s. From
that point it was then possible to distribute the calculation power to process the
information where required, and on demand, as they say.
This turning point took place in the 1990s, initially in defense and security
systems, and was then rapidly generalized in the decade 2000–2010 with the
ubiquity of the Internet and of the World Wide Web. This revolution – since it is
much more than a simple evolution – explicitly generated a central architectural
motif that constitutes the heart of systemics, because for the integration operator to
play their role, it was still necessary for the elements to be integrable and for them to
have something in common: the information that makes them exist. This
“something” is an “exchange model” that we will detail in Chapters 8 and 9.
Finally, a new phenomenon to consider is the all-pervasive nature of errors. Not

only in the physical components of systems, but also – and this is entirely new at
this scale – in their functional component and generally in the form of programs, no
matter how this component is integrated into the system. This is the third aspect of
our approach. These errors will lead to malfunctions with varying degrees of serious
consequences, taking into account the context of the system use. The system safety,
including its human component, becomes a main preoccupation so that the systemic
approach will allow us to understand better in order to construct systems whose
architecture guarantees that they are both robust and resilient to inevitable hazards.
This is an intrinsic dimension of the overall complexity and necessary, in order to
give them an autonomy that is as good as possible, given the technologies and the
methods used to develop them and implement them.
1
The Legacy of Norbert Wiener and

the Birth of Cybernetics
Without intending to be an exhaustive historical account, this chapter provides

some specific details regarding the concerns of the founders of what is now the
science of systems or systemics, in order to understand the stakes that still remain
extremely relevant today. Its objective is to avoid the anachronisms that are often the
origins of serious misinterpretations.
In this chapter, we propose to revisit the key event system sciences, or systemics
originated, in which the mathematician N. Wiener, professor at MIT, has been an
emblematic actor1. The summary that we propose does not claim to provide a
chronological history of the facts as far as it could be restituted2, which would in any
case not be of great interest. It attempts, on the other hand, to recreate the dramatic
climate of the era in which all available researchers find themselves caught up in the
efforts of the Anglo-American war to fight against totalitarian regimes. Some do so
with conviction and without scruples, such as J. von Neumann, others due to a moral
duty, such as N. Wiener who was a pacifist and felt disgusted by violence. This is a
period of intense interactions and exchanges between exceptional scientific
personalities, often of European origin, where urgent action against totalitarian
regimes is the common good. To make sense of this situation, it is necessary to
1 But not the only actor! J. von Neumann played a major role, if not more important, on the
practical and theoretical plans. For a complete overview, refer to G. Dyson, Turing’s
Cathedral – The Origins of the Digital Universe, Penguin, 2012; W. Aspray, John von Neumann
and the Origins of Modern Computing, MIT Press, 1990, in particular Chapter 8, “A theory of
information processing”.
2 One of the essential works that best describes this very particular atmosphere is the work by
S.J. Heims, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener, From Mathematics to the Technologies of
Life and Death, MIT Press, 1980; and more recently, P. Kennedy, Le grand tournant: pourquoi
les alliés ont gagné la guerre, 1943–45, Perrin, 2012.

imagine trying to put ourselves in the situation in order to judge the potential
importance of the contributions made by each one, and to do this, it is essential to
have a thorough understanding of the problem.
REMARK.– We have voluntarily ignored the contribution made by the biologist

L. von Bertalanffy and his General System Theory, which today is only of historical
interest3. Its influence in the field of engineering has been small, even zero, given
the level of generality in which it was situated, and in any case, engineering was not
his field of concern, contrary to N. Wiener, C. Shannon, J. von Neumann or
A. Turing who “got their hands dirty” with machines and/or real systems.
1.1. The birth of systemics: the facts
The problem presented to N. Wiener4 and his group at the MIT5 was to study
methods to increase the number of shots hitting the target and improve
anti-aircraft defense, whose effectiveness could be measured by the ratio of the
number of shots fired per downed airplane. Its overall objective was to improve the
management of “shell” resources, inflict the greatest damage to the enemy (airplane
pilots are a rare resource) and above all to save human lives.
At the time, when N. Wiener began his reflection, a summary of the

technological environment would read as follows:
Gunners had perfect knowledge of ballistics and used firing charts to make
adjustments to land-based cannons, for straight shots and for parabolic shots, over
distances up to 20–30 km (correction required for the Coriolis force that is caused by
the rotation of the Earth). The final targeting was carried out by observers close to
the points of impact, who gave correction orders by telephone in 1914 and then by
radio in 1939–1940. Shots were fired by the DCA (air defence) in a completely new
environment onto moving targets – airplanes with speeds of up to 600 km/h, in other
words, approximately 170 m/sec, at altitudes of 5–6,000 m. With shells of high
initial speed, 800–1,000 m/sec, 5–6 seconds passed before the explosion capable of
destroying the target was triggered, without taking into account the deceleration that
slows down the initial speed.
3 For an exhaustive study, refer to the thesis by D. Pouvreau, Une histoire de la

“systémologie générale” de Ludwig Bertalanffy – Généalogie, genèse, actualisation et
postérité d’un projet herméneutique, EHESS, March 2013.
4 Refer to Chapter 12, “The war years 1940–1945”, from his autobiography, I Am a
Mathematician, MIT Press, 1964.
5 Among others J. Bigelow; refer to article “Behavior, purpose and teleology”, cowritten by
A. Rosenblueth, N. Wiener, J. Bigelow, which can be downloaded from the JSTOR website.
The Legacy of Norbert Wiener and the Birth of Cybernetics 7
REMARK.– In 10 seconds of freefall, a weighted object travels approximately 500 m

and reaches a speed of 100 m/sec (360 km/h).
Combined with the speed of the airplane and with the initiatives taken by the
pilot who can change course, we can easily understand that the “shot hitting the
target” is something highly improbable. It is also the reason why it is necessary to
“spray” a very wide area, with many cannons and a great quantity of munitions, to
have a hope of making an impact; it is best to forget about efficiency.
The first radar (radio detection and ranging) equipment made their first
appearance in England where they played an essential role and allowed the RAF to
contain the attacks by the Luftwaffe. The radar allowed regrouping bomber
formations to be “seen” far in advance, something that no observer would be able to
detect simply by visual means, given the distances, with in situ information an
impossibility. Thanks to radar, the command center for aerial operations understands
what is probably going to happen and can therefore position its retaliation in
advance with maximum efficiency for “attack” airplanes. In other words, radar
provides all information about the trajectory followed by the target: position, speed
and possible acceleration, and integrates all that to calculate the probable trajectories
of bombers.
MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) had, at the time, one of the very
first electronics laboratories for the study of servomechanisms – the Lincoln
Laboratory. It later proved its worth in the construction of the SAGE system6, the
first anti-aircraft defense system that can be described as modern. Servomechanisms
are becoming essential devices for automatic adjustment of mobile mechanical parts
in such a way as to control their movements as minutely as possible and absorb the
shocks that generate destructive vibrations. This is fundamental to move the chassis
of anti-aircraft guns and follow the trajectory of target airplanes. Servo-control of
the movement requires precise measurements, in particular of the mass to be moved,
in order to activate effectors with the right adjustment data and make cyclic
corrections.
These developing automatisms led to all studies concerned with the transfer
functions that have the fundamental properties of reincorporating as inputs some of
the results that they produce as outputs. Knowledge of the function of transfer,
obtained either empirically by experimentation; theoretically by calculation, or by
combination of both of these, is therefore fundamental data for correct control of the
mechanisms in question.
6 Semi Automatic Ground Environment; refer to the book by K.C. Redmond, From Whirlwind
to MITRE: The R&D Story of The SAGE Air Defense Computer, MIT Press.
Using these mechanisms, amplification will be possible in a ratio of 1:100,

1:1000 or much more, depending on the principle of the control stick or of the
rudder. They use a low energy signal (electric current, shearing a hydraulic circuit)
which at a smaller scale closely reproduces a phenomenon of much greater energy,
such as the movement of a gun carriage that may weigh several hundreds of kilos, or
even a few metric tons for the turrets of marine artillery for which compensation of
the erratic movements of the boat must be made. Obtaining “true” signals that are
uncontaminated by random “noises” from the environment is therefore absolutely
essential.
We also know how to “calculate” some of the fundamental mathematical

operations of differential and integral calculus, in a rapid and unexpected manner.
This is by using analogical calculators that are quite difficult to manipulate, such as
those that equip the gunsights of B29 bombers – another celebrated airplane among
those used during World War II. The first computers arrived a few years later, but it
is certain that N. Wiener already had relatively precise intuition given the
exceptional environment that he was surrounded by and to which he was one of the
star contributors. He knew J. von Neumann well and had held discussions with him
on many occasions7.
Rather than making long and fastidious calculations by hand, consulting tables
and charts that are familiar to engineers, it was becoming simpler to carry out
calculations directly with “programmed” functions in analogical form. And since in
addition, we knew how to “clean” the signal that carried information about the
background noise, it was possible to calculate the adjustment parameters required
for the various appliances, on demand.
1.1.1. The idea of integration
N. Wiener’s stroke of genius is to have understood that by integrating all these

technologies appropriately and by managing to ensure all those working on their
development worked together, we would be able to create machines capable of
imitating behaviors such as the gesture of a baseball player. A popular sport among
students at Ivy League universities on the East Coast, baseball requires precisely
intercepting balls arriving with strange trajectories (“curveballs”), thrown by the
“pitcher”.
In a certain way, we can say that the machine has, in the memory of its electronic
circuits, a “model” of the behavior of objects on which it is supposed to act, to be
precise the airplane/pilot couple. The dedicated term to designate this type of
7 Refer to John von Neumann: Selected letters, History of mathematics, vol. 27, London
Mathematical Society, American Mathematical Society, Miklos Rédei.
capacity, that only appeared with the first IT applications 30 years later, is
“metamodel”, because the rules that define it are independent of the medium. They
are beyond, or above (the meaning of the Greek word μετα) the material format.
Since programming is itself a model, the model of this programming is described as
a metamodel to avoid confusion; it is a logical entity that is capable of instructing
itself with its own rules, such as the universal Turing machine that can instruct itself
or the grammar of written French which in this case is its own metalanguage. When
computers began their exponential development, in the 1970s–1980s, we quickly
understood that these fundamental rules to understand systems can, and even must,
be specified in a language that is independent from the various possible targets. It
can be expressed in the language of the universal Turing machine, independent of all
technology8, therefore adaptable to all physical formats that allow their logic to be
expressed in a way that can be represented (analogue circuitry, electronic tubes and
soon transistors). This is a pure abstraction, totally immaterial, but without which it
is impossible to act. The model obtained in this way concentrates the information
required for action of the system (what it does, in operational terms) and for action
on the system (how it is done) in its physical reality; it defines the means of valid
interactions, and to this end, it operates as a grammar of the actions to be carried out.
REMARK.– We note that any abstraction level in a system is a model of the entities
that are thus abstracted. In a modern computer, there are easily 20 of them! Rather
than piling up the “meta”, it is more simple and clearer to say that layer N has a
model of the layer that is immediately lower in the hierarchy of system entities,
which allows us to program services on this same layer using only the interface
defined by the model.
Now we turn to 1942–1943, when already one of the first laws of new systemics
could be formulated:
To interact with an environment, any system must have an abstract model of this
environment, meaning of the information, independently of the physical/organic
nature of this environment and of the system (law no. 2 of the compendium, section
C.2.2).
In the case of the firing system studied by N. Wiener, the model comprises
rational mechanical equations, Lagrange/Hamilton version, applied to the ballistics
of atmospheric trajectories whose parameters must be known: temperature, pressure,
humidity, winds, etc.
8 In theoretical computer science, the Church–Turing thesis states that everything that is
“calculable”, in the logical sense of the word, can be expressed by a Turing machine which
becomes, due to this, a universal modeling language; this is the case today where computer
science has diffused into all disciplines.
Machines designed on these principles – imitating certain behaviors that are until
then characteristic of living organisms – were thus attributed with an entirely
mechanical “intelligence”. Later, in the 1950s, it was known as “artificial
intelligence”9, completely constructed by human intelligence, thanks to knowledge
of the laws of nature and the capacity for rapid and precise retroactions, for second-
or third-order corrections (these are infinitesimal quantities), meaning the magnitude
at instant t, its first and second derivatives. More prudent, Norbert Wiener used the
term “machine learning”, as early as 1946, less misleading and more precise than the
media-friendly “artificial intelligence”, to create dreams! A term that is still used in
the United States, in preference to artificial intelligence.
In fact, the airplane trajectory is not random because it is subject to different

types of determinisms that the pilot must take account of in their decisions, knowing
that they can be impossible to predict, although probable. The airplane is subject to
the laws of rational mechanics and to the laws that mechanics of its structures that
can break, the strength of materials being one of the pillars of engineering sciences.
The pilot can also execute dangerous, even mortal, maneuvers, for their own
physiological safety (“black” sheet, increase of the apparent weight and difficulty in
moving, loss of consciousness due to the centrifugal force, etc.), and it must take
into account the decisions of other pilots in their squadron. Despite all these
constraints, the trajectory can be extrapolated and calculated thanks to the data
collected by radars. N. Wiener was a master of calculation of apparently random
trajectories, such as those particles subject to Brownian motion, that he was the first
to know how to calculate, using Lebesgue integrals of which this was one of the first
concrete applications. He considered statistical mechanics, and its creators J.C.
Maxwell, L. Boltzmann and J. Willard Gibbs, as an absolutely essential contribution
to the new physics that was taking shape, and as a more correct understanding of
the, operation of nature and of its representation.
REMARK.– Let us remember that for a curveball, at least four points are required.
With a single point, we are in “a ball”, two points determine a direction (the speed).
With three we have the plane acceleration (curvature) and with four we have two
planes and therefore the torsion of the curve – in other words a position and three
vectors. With these four parameters, the movement can be located in a narrower and
narrower cone.
This data can be the basis for calculation of the exact values, to provide to
servomechanisms to point the guns in the right direction, follow the movement of
airplanes and adjust the shell rockets so that they explode at the right moment, in the
most probable region of the presence of airplanes. All of this takes place while
9 Term used by J. Mc Carty, in 1955–1957, then at Dartmouth, with a preference for the
austere Mathematical logic.
correcting the margin with the latest data coming from the radars, as long as
calculations are made fast enough and data is transfered without error10. Effectively,
between the instant T of the situation, and the instant where the orders transmitted will
be effective, there is a time difference ΔT; if ΔT is too big, given the evolution of the
situation, the orders will not be adapted. This interval ΔT, response time and/or latency
of phenomena, is a fundamental information regarding the transfer function.
N. Wiener very quickly understood that here he had at hand all the ingredients
for a new method of analysis of the problems, allowing new solutions to situations
that had remained inaccessible to analysis because they were too complex – far
beyond “simple” machines that engineers had dealt with until then. And with a
correct interaction of what is “simple”, we could create something “complex” that is
controlled, useful and organized, which respects the laws of engineering. His own
way of creating order in a world that is subject to undifferentiated disorder.
He christened this “new science” cybernetics, or the art of steering, in the same
way as a helmsman, by adapting the Greek word (κυβερνητική) used to designate
the pilot of ships with which the ancient Greeks had conquered the Mediterranean –
an unstable sea if ever there was one – and a term that is found in the roots of many
words such as government, to govern, etc.
The very essence of this new science pertains to time-related actions that are
carried out in an unstable environment – to go from a point A to a point B in a
nonlinear fashion, exactly like a helmsman who knows that a straight line is never the
right way to go about setting a course when currents, tides, winds, the movement of
the boat (rolling, pitch, yaw), waves, etc. need to be taken into account to maneuver
the sails and the rudder. The actions carried out are finalized11, meaning organized and
controlled as a function of the objective to be reached, the goal, and this is the new
fundamental point, which is a moving target resulting from an environment that is
itself structured but whose laws are largely unknown, although they do exist (much
later, deterministic chaos was used to characterize them). It must therefore be possible
to continuously adapt the action plan, which is difficult with analog calculators, but
which is intrinsic to the architecture of von Neumann where the information recorded
in the computer memory (computing instrument in his terminology) is sometimes
10 In his book dated 1951, Reliable Organisms From Unreliable Components, von Neumann
wrote: “Error is viewed, therefore, not as an extraneous and misdirected or misdirecting
accident, but as an essential part of the process.” Also refer to Chapter 15, “Theory of
self-reproducing automata”, in the book by G. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, already cited,
which is essential regarding the central role played by the errors in the engineering process.
11 Before the very official Macy Conferences, from 1942 to 1953, there had been an
ephemeral Teleological Society which met informally; refer to S.J. Heims, The Cybernetics
Group, MIT Press. In French, refer to the book by J.-P. Dupuy, Aux origines des sciences
cognitives, which gives a good overview of this, but from a point of view that is subject to
discussion, interesting in the same way as everything else he has done and written.
program and sometimes data (but another 10 years were required before this logic
dream became reality). How can the environment be put to good use to reach the
objectives: this is the ambition of cybernetics. To do this, it will be necessary to be
“intelligent”, in N. Wiener’s meaning of the term, meaning as a mathematician12.
Taking time to think about it, we see that we are dealing with a double
trajectory13, a double dynamic. On the one hand, the aspect imposed by the
environment (meaning what is considered as not part of the system), what biologists
like C. Waddington named “epigenetic landscape” (that René Thom rechristened
substrate space or even phenomenological deployment) and on the other hand, the
mobile aspect that the pilot can direct taking into account the intrinsic properties of
this mobility and the experience that it has of the behaviors observed in the
environment and of the evolving dynamic that characterizes it. The steering
therefore consists of servo-controlling the trajectory to go from A to B, using the
environmental dynamics to advantage in order to optimize the journey. When the
pilot has navigated sufficiently and acquired experience – either empirically or
theoretically through knowledge of the phenomenological laws that structure
transformations of the environment that they are also part of – they know how to put
the actions together that will allow them to reach their goal, scheduling that they
alone can judge because they know the local situation.
The pilot must therefore extract information from their environment and to do this,
they must have suitable sensors, and translate this information in the behavioral
“language” of the effectors of the mobile that the designer is master of, an operation
that physicists and electronic engineers are very familiar with, for which the dedicated
term is “transduction”, for example transform an electric current into hydraulic
pressure servo-controlled on the signal conveyed by the current (see Chapter 6).
In N. Wiener’s approach, anyone who uses the term interactions, implicitly

means elements that interact in a certain order via energy exchanges. These elements
are the constituents of the system (the buildings blocks in today’s computer science
jargon; a much better term than that of “black box” often used at the time), to the
exclusion of others that are therefore simply ignored, but which exist all the same.
For N elements, there are N×(N-1) monodirectional exchange links, but if the
system organizes itself, if certain elements have a “memory” (possibly from layered
human operators), it will be necessary to consider all the parts of these elements.
Either through theoretically 2N combinations or sequences of temporal actions that
are possible in an even greater number, sequences that will be investigated thanks to
12 Refer to his autobiography, I Am a Mathematician, MIT Press, 1956, which leaves no

doubt about the way we see the world.
13 In geometry, these are graphs known as tracers; refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Tractrix.
the theory of automatons for which J. von Neumann provided the basis at a later
date14. The beginnings of the theory or theories of complexity therefore took root
right at the start of the science of systems, but it was J. von Neumann who was the
true initiator15. Curiously, N. Wiener never talks about this, nor does he talk about
the theory of automatons, which does not mean that he did not know it16! Organizing
this complexity, meaning specifying the architecture of the system using rigorous
and precise logicomathematical models, quickly became the organizing center of
projects, such as the SAGE system, with J. Forrester who carried out the first living
demonstration of this in the 1950s.
He was the first to become fully aware of the practical problems of

interdisciplinarity and attempted to resolve them, thanks to models that allow
exchanges between the concerned parties, including military personnel in the case of
SAGE17.
Concerning the very object of cybernetics, N. Wiener’s point of view cannot be

clearer. He tells us18:
“From the point of view of cybernetics, the world is an organism,

neither so tightly joined that it cannot be changed in some aspects
without losing all of its identity in all aspects nor so loosely jointed
that any one thing can happen as readily as any other thing. It is a
world which lacks both the rigidity of the Newtonian model of physics
and the detail-less flexibility of a state of maximum entropy or heat
death, in which nothing really new can happen. It is a world of
Process, neither one of a final equilibrium to which Process leads nor
one determined in advance of all happenings, by a pre-established
harmony such as that of Leibniz… Life is the continual interplay
between the individual and his environment, rather than a way of
existing under the form of eternity.”
14 Concerning this very fundamental subject, we can re-read the memo written by
C. Shannon, Von Neumann’s Contributions to Automata Theory (readily available on the
Internet); also refer to the recent book by G. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral – The Origins of the
Digital Universe, already cited.
15 Refer to the retranscriptions of his conferences at the Hixon symposium, September 1948,
on Theory of Self-reproducing Automata, University of Illinois Press, 1966, published
posthumously by A.W. Burks; and volume V of the complete works: Design of Computers,
Theory of Automata and Numerical Analysis, Pergamon Press, 1961. This is irrevocable for
anyone who wants to take the trouble to read, then. S. Ulam developed certain ideas provided
by his colleague and friend about self-reproducing automatons.
16 He certainly uses the term “automaton”, but not in the rigorous mathematical sense that
von Neumann gave it in his various writings.
17 On all these aspects, refer to K. Redmond, T. Smith, From Whirlwind to MITRE, The R&D
story of the SAGE Air Defense computer, MIT Press, 2000, already cited.
18 Autobiographie, p. 327.
This is indeed about the science of systems, with no doubt, even though we
could detail his words further.
1.1.2. Implementation and the first applications
Cybernetics has had a strange fate on each side of the Atlantic.
In the United States, it has remained grosso modo an engineering science where
it has prospered under the auspices of the MIT, with in particular J. Forrester, SAGE
project director and future professor at the Sloan School. He published, among
others, two books that marked important milestones in systems sciences: Industrial
Dynamics, in 1961 and Principles of Systems, in 1971, recently republished by
Pegasus Communications. Cybernetics by N. Wiener, (Forrester version), has been
successfully included in the engineering cycles of complex systems, sometimes
without even being mentioned by name, a true implementation of the “wou wei”, the
art of governing without action, without effort and spontaneously, of the emperors of
China19, particularly in engineering of quality20 which is fundamentally an integrated
control throughout the system lifecycle in compliance with the service contract
requested by the system users. Quality is a “trajectory”, a pathway, which is
constructed by taking into account the hazards of the project environment, including
those of organizations. For this, it must be kept in mind by all the actors and
concerned parties, and not in a quality sense that is exhibited like a dancer to
demonstrate that it is being done. The vocation of quality is to be, not to only seem,
prominent and not salient, which acts like a force field. The entropic nature of
human activity means that if it is not maintained over time, it degenerates and the
undifferentiated disorder takes over again.
Recently, systemics has even undergone a true media success in the United
States with a cult book, The Fifth Discipline, which presents System Thinking for a
wide-ranging public, in the simple language that English-speakers enjoy so much21.
19 In the Forbidden City in Beijing, in the meeting room of the Palace of Tranquil Longevity,
all visitors can see the two characters “wou wei” written in traditional Chinese above the
throne of the Emperor: 無爲.
20 Refer to the works of G. Weinberg, in particular Quality Software Management, System
Thinking, Dorset House Publishing, 1991.
21 The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (first edition
1990, latest edition 2006); book by Peter Senge, professor at MIT. P. Senge explains in this
book the integrator role of System Thinking in what is known as Core Disciplines: Personal
mastery, Mental Models, Building Shared Vision, Team Learning which are also great classics
in the field of quality management and project management.
In France, things have been different because very quickly cybernetics sought
fields of application that went far beyond what they were capable of explaining, owing
to a lack of prediction, in sociology of organizations or in biology22. Norbert Wiener
himself probably contributed indirectly to this state of affairs under the influence of his
book destined for the wider public The Human Use of Human Beings, which was very
quickly released in French under the simple title Cybernétique et société23 (meaning
“Cybernetics and Society”). This a more accessible book than his Cybernetics: or
Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, which appeared
simultaneously in 1948 from MIT Press and Hermann in France. In the rest of this
volume, we will denote that book by the shorthand C/CCAM.
Unavailable for a long time in French, this seminal book was translated by Éditions du Seuil,
in 2014, in the Sources du savoir collection, with a presentation of the context by the science
historian Ronan Le Roux, based on his PhD thesis work, La cybernétique en France
(1948–1970) (cybernetics in France), defended in 201024. The French title is: La cybernétique –
information et régulation dans le vivant et la machine (meaning: Cybernetics – Information and
regulation in living beings and machines). We note that control has been rendered by control,
which is perfectly correct, but that communication and animal have respectively been rendered
by information and living, two translations that we can contest. As Wiener himself says,
“Traduttore, traditore” (C/CCAM, Chapter VIII, “Information, language, and society”).
In the introduction to their book The Mathematical Theory of Communication, Shannon

and Weaver are, however, particularly clear. They tell us, in the introduction: “The
fundamental problem of communication is the reproduction, either exactly or approximately
at one point, of a message that was selected at another point. Frequently the messages have
meaning; […] These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering
problem.” In communication, we are only interested in the structure, in the syntax and the
coding, and of course in the mistakes. The distinction between communication and
information is therefore very radical. When we talk about ICT, we note the same distinction;
in academic disciplinary fields, we distinguish sciences and technologies of information and
communication (STIC) from other fields, while maintaining the distinction between
information and communication. Mathematics, in the sense that it constitutes the “language of
nature”, is part of the STIC, but mathematicians would certainly be offended if we said to
them that their science came from cybernetics, irrelevant they would say! Look at the short
text by Grothendieck, found below. This choice of translation is therefore not the most
judicious, at the least, because it maintains a confusion, which means that the proposed
translation is at the limit of a false meaning. “Information” is much wider than
“communication”, and includes sciences of language, natural and/or artificial, including
22 We can re-read the remarkable recension of this work produced by L. de Broglie in no. 7
of the NRF review, July 1953, Sens philosophique et portée pratique de la cybernétique,
unfortunately too quickly forgotten.
23 Several editions, including the most comprehensive by UGE/10-18 in 1971.
24 Available from Garnier under the title Une histoire de la cybernétique en France, 2018.
mathematics. The information is intentional by nature, performative as linguists say, because

it conveys meaning, which is something that the communication according to Shannon
refuses to do, and which, just like the laws of physics, needs to remain objective. The same
can be said for the term “living”. Animals are unequivocally elements of the living, in
general; with viruses, the frontier with chemistry is perhaps more blurred? Animals are living
organisms that are born and die; their main objective is to survive, because as P. Kourilsky
states in his book Le jeu du hasard et de la complexité, “to live, you firstly need to survive”.
To survive, eat, reproduce, animals have projects, they develop strategies, with intermediate
objectives, and a final goal. Where there is no purpose, there is no control, because in order to
control it is necessary to know with respect to what we are controlling; this is perfectly clear
in C/CCAM, as well as in the article “Behavior, purpose and teleology”, previously cited.
Why has this choice of translation been made? Is it the very notion of teleology that bothers
translators of the book? We know that the “politically incorrect” term purpose/teleology is
banned from biological speech, let us say since the book by Jacques Monod, Le hasard et la
nécessité (Chance and Necessity), replaced by “chance” which in this case does things very
well. This is a little strange in engineering sciences, because what is more teleological than
engineering? Even though we use the term “project” because it is indeed teleology that we are
talking about. The entire quality approach, up to the most recent developments, like lean
management, is teleological in its very essence. Project management is a perfect example of
application of cybernetics to an engineering organization as is practiced in systems
engineering. Norbert Wiener was a professor in one of the most prestigious engineering
institutions and he trained engineers (see section 1.3). Manufacturing machines or systems
presumes that there is an objective to be reached, an objective that will materialize in a
construction plan, with the detail of the parts and of the assembly method, without which
integration is impossible when the number of parts exceeds a few dozen. With 100 parts, there
is a factor 100 (noted 100!) combinations, in other words approximately ≅ 9.3 × 10157; given
that there are only 1080 atoms of hydrogen in the observable universe, do we understand that
without a plan, chance will not operate?! In an engineering project, the importance attributed
to chance must be zero; this is what we call risk management, a risk that must be compensated
for by suitable counter-measures for the engineering to be sound.
I have not gone through the entire translation with a fine comb, but we can all the same
remark that in the introduction to the 1948 version, the article by Rosenblueth, Wiener and
Bigelow, above, appears as a footnote, whereas the note disappears in the translation (done on
the 2nd edition in 1961 with MIT Press, whom I have not consulted). To be perfectly honest,
R. Le Roux does mention this article in his presentation, and gives a brief summary of it.
These few reservations aside, we acknowledge this translation; but as always, it is

necessary to consult the sources themselves, which nothing can replace.
Box 1.1. The translation of Cybernetics by N. Wiener

Thanks to cybernetics, N. Wiener intended to explain the complexity of human

societies, history, which in positivistic minds like A. Comte awakened old memories
of the social “engineering” and “physics” of which É. Durkheim positioned himself
as a master in his founding works. In the atmosphere of the 1950s, in the middle of
the Cold War that may have turned hot at any moment, some dreamed of “machines
to govern the world” managed by “scientists”, considered more reliable than the
politicians and ideologists that had plunged the world into chaos. Utopic dream, of
course, because since von Neumann had restated, a short time before his death by
interrogating: “Who is guarding the guardians?” This is the entire problem,
centralized and/or distributed, you must choose, and interact, avoiding both gulags
and re-education camps for “new humanity”, and the individualistic disorders of
“every man for himself”.
It is still the case that cybernetics never really entered the territory of engineering
sciences, except at the edges, thanks to individual initiatives25, with a small
exception in the CNAM syllabus, where the action of professors J. Lesourne26 and
J.-P. Meinadier27 must be shown; in any case not in the large engineering school
programs, where it had a reputation as rather scandalous and not serious. It is true
that when we examine the jargon introduced by Edgar Morin in a cold light and
without searching for controversy, we have a sickening feeling due to the excessive
inflation of verbs and the combination of hollow words that flow freely28.
“Nebulous” our teachers would have said! Creating neologisms each time that we
believe we have discovered something original has never explained anything, nor
resolved the smallest problem. We have known this ever since G. d’Ockham and his
principle of sobriety, at least!
Without injury to the past, and reconstructing a plausible situation, perhaps in the
mindset of N. Wiener, this was a way of providing retort to J. von Neumann who
had just released his very famous Theory of Games and Economic Behavior that was
going to revolutionize economic sciences – except that he did not have the
mathematical language that would have allowed him to express his ideas that were
forming in all directions. For anyone who has read in detail his latest works, in
particular God & Golem, Inc. published in 1964, the year of his death, it is very
25 Such as the one by G. Donnadieu at the IAE; refer to his book, written with M. Karski, La
systémique, Penser et agir dans la complexité, 2002.
26 His book, Les systèmes du destin, Dalloz, 1976, and a few others, have been a basis for his
lessons in forecasting.
27 His two books, Ingénierie et intégration des systèmes, 1998, and Le métier d’intégration de
systèmes, 2002, both with Hermès, remain essential reference works.
28 This remark only relates to the part of his book that concerns La méthode and similar texts;
his sociology analyses are generally interesting. Refer to the point of view expressed by J.-P.
Dupuy in Ordres et désordres, Chapter 7, “La simplicité de la complexité”, that I share.
clear. He said to us (p. 88): “cybernetics is nothing if not mathematical”, and a little
further: “I have found mathematical sociology and mathematical economics or
econometrics suffering under a misapprehension of what the proper use of
mathematics is in social sciences and of what is to be expected from mathematical
techniques, and I have deliberately refrained from giving advice that, as I was
convinced, would of course lead to a flood of superficial and ill-considered work.”
In addition, he was quite critical of J. von Neumann’s game theory because he

considered that it was impossible to assimilate the economy to an immobile game, in
a world where everything changes, including the rules of the game, which is
obvious; unfortunately, J. von Neumann, who died in 1957, was no longer there to
provide an answer. No doubt that N. Wiener would have had a strong reaction to
jargon and the conceptual clutter that inundated his theory, and made cybernetics
inoperable, at least for engineers, – he who had been a professor at one of the most
prestigious universities in the world, his beloved MIT. Concerning “financial
mathematics”, an oxymoron, and the “systemic crisis” that we have been going
through since 2008, he would very probably choke with anger “Ill-considered
work!”
Now this language that is required for a good description of the processes that
are at work in systems, came about in the 1950s–1960s. Today we are well aware of
this: this is the language of computer science, and more particularly languages such
as IDEF, UML/SysML and BPML/BPMN29.
R. Thom who was very strongly opposed in his typically undiplomatic fashion to
the “dictatorship of fuzzy concepts”30 had attempted to answer this with his
catastrophe theory, a name introduced by his English colleague C. Zeeman. He did
not claim to have instigated himself, but even this was not a great success, for the
totally opposite reason that a high level of mathematics was required to understand
his geometric language, involving differential manifolds and singularities. One of
his best commentators, the great Russian mathematician V. Arnold31, said that
between two lines of Thom, 99 more lines were needed to create something that was
at least comprehensible! His work Stabilité structurelle et morphogenèse (1972)
could therefore have rivalled the thousands of pages of the seminar on algebraic
geometry given by his colleague at the IHES, A. Grothendieck. Communication was
decidedly difficult!
29 Refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEF; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_Modeling_

Language; in addition to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Process_Modeling_Language.
30 Refer to his article published in Les Débats, “Halte au hasard, silence au bruit”, 1980.
31 Refer to his book Catastrophe Theory, 3rd edition, Springer, 1992.
This was therefore another lost opportunity and yet the requirement had been
created by the significant increase in the complexity of the systems designed by
engineers, with computer science endlessly replicated or almost so, at all levels as
had become obvious in the Apollo space projects and especially the Space Shuttle.
Complexity of systems whose risks are beginning to be recognized, if not truly
understood, such as “high-frequency” transactions, but can we still talk about
engineering in the context of financial computer science32? Risks that also
understandably give rise to irrational fears. The obligation to provide explanations is
therefore more pressing than it has ever been in the history of sciences and
techniques. For someone who does not understand, knowledge very easily turns into
magic, which would open the door to irrational ideas, were they not saddled with
mathematics that lack in rigor, such as in finance.
Having a general method for consideration of the complexity of the system of the
world in the 21st Century and extracting from this all that can reasonably be
automated (without losing grip on the pedals and remaining in control of events) is
the essence of the problem that we need to resolve.
To do this, we must consider three areas of complexity, in a symbiotic

relationship, at the very center of systems in interactions, distinct but indissociable.
The complexity of the technical objects/systems33 that we are capable of

constructing and maintaining is the traditional complexity that engineers have
always had to overcome, ever since the era of cathedrals.
This basic complexity has been added to by:

– the complexity of corresponding engineering projects that force all the
interested parties in the system to work in a coordinated manner, that is, in the case
of a large project, several thousands of actors are required to work in phase with
each other over the long term (in quantum mechanics, we would say they are
“correlated”);
– the complexity of uses – meaning semantics, the “what is this used for” –
induced by technical objects that we have available and the new requirements that
these objects provoke, objects that are now accessible to all; with Internet and the
World Wide Web, we are talking about millions of users, even billions!
Organizing and integrating these three complexities (see Figure 1.2) into a
coherent whole, finding the right compromise, or at the very least one that is
32 Refer to the book by J.-F. Gayraud, Le Nouveau Capitalisme Criminel, Odile Jacob, 2014.
33 Concerning this double notion, refer to G. Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets
techniques, Aubier, and B. Gille, Histoire des techniques, Encyclopédie Pléiade.
acceptable, without taking inconsiderate risks, this is the challenge that will be
examined in Chapters 8 and 9. One of the most significant characteristics of
complexity34 is the emergence of properties and/or new behaviors that it is
impossible to anticipate, in particular everything that relates to uncertainties of all
kinds that are present everywhere, which in information theory is known as “noise”.
Learning to compensate for these hazards, to live intelligently with “noise”, or even
to use it in the same way as in error correction codes, is the key to complex systems
engineering.
We can summarize the sequence that began in the 1940s by the representation in
Figure 1.1. This is the result of the work of two generations of engineers and
researchers. The third, which is beginning to position itself at the controls, has
immense prospects ahead, if it is able to rise to the challenge and demonstrate that it
is up to the task.
In this sequence, France has proved itself worthy, with systems such as STRIDA
or SENIT created by the Ministry of Defense. It has a data transmission network that
is among the best in the world, thanks to its historical operator, France Télécom and
its historical research center, the CNET (which is now FT R&D or what remains of
it). Thanks to EDF’s energy transport network, (which is now EDF/RTE), all French
households and companies have a high-quality, low-cost supply, a system that has
shown many times how robust it is, and that we will come back to in section 8.2. We
could mention aeronautics, the space industry, the automotive industry, information
systems with the MERISE method that introduced on a large scale the logical
concept of computer science metamodels, etc.
All this demonstrates, over and above all the more or less pessimistic speeches, a
great capacity to manage highly complex environments that are one of the legacies
of the generation of the 30-year post-war boom in France, and that we need to make
productive and improve.
The diagram in Figure 1.1 is a simplification, but it demonstrates a dynamism

and a stage of advancement that cannot be ignored. In the 1970s–1980s there was a
profusion of projects that did not all produce the expected results but which
obviously demonstrate a capacity that will be useful. For this, students at reputable
scientific universities and business/management schools must reinvest in the scope
of systems and industry, abandoned in the 1990s–2000s, as the various reports on
competitiveness have widely demonstrated.
34 Refer to the book by the physicist P. Bak, How Nature Works – The Science of Self-
Organized Criticality, Springer, 1996.
Figure 1.1. From the generation of pioneers to the digital economy generation
It is certain that the system culture that today culminates in C4ISTAR

(Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance,
Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance) systems, this fifth discipline to reuse the
title of the American best-seller by P. Senge, a professor at the MIT who is very
familiar with the works of J. Forrester, played a critical role.
REMARK.– It is not prohibited to believe that the general culture (both scientific and
managerial) of French engineers familiar with abstraction including with its
humanist dimension, has a lot to say on the subject, given our accomplishments and
our expertise, such as the electronuclear program implemented by EDF which
allows each one of us to have cheap and high-quality energy.
1.2. Modeling for understanding: the computer science singularity
In the 1990s–2000s, it became obvious that what the pioneers N. Wiener, J. von
Neumann and A. Turing had imagined was beginning to turn into reality. Of the
three, only N. Wiener perhaps knew about transistors (he never talked about them).
None of them could have foreseen that one day, thanks to the magic of
microelectronics and the integration of components, machines would be available
(von Neumann referred to a computing instrument) with performance a million
times better than those that they had contributed to creating, and means of
communication allowing: (a) images to be transmitted in real time from one end of
the planet to the other, and (b) machines to work in networks on problems of a size
that goes far beyond what any human would be capable of mastering. This capacity
was going to allow an “en masse” programming, in the large as our American
colleagues say, that was almost inexistent in the 1950s. However, some 40 years later
were processed billions of lines of code programmed by millions of programmers
making up the profession today. Each second, hundreds of billions of programmed
instructions loyally execute, without error nor fatigue, what the programmers recorded
in the memory of the machines, measured in billions of characters. But as we will see
in this book, as an echo of a strange symmetry this immense success generated
simultaneously its set of new problems, in particular safety.
An instrument like the LHC35 at the CERN produces billions of pieces of

information for each experiment, that only correctly programmed computers are
capable of analyzing and “understanding”. What the wider public knows as Big
Data is only accessible thanks to the programs aiding mathematical processing of
information, only able to identify in the apparently shapeless “mass” what carries
interesting information.
Today, at the start of the 21st Century, several billion people, via their
smartphones and/or the tablets, have a capacity for interaction and access to
information via the Internet and the World Wide Web, at a scale that has never been
seen in the known history of humanity. They can form communities of interest via
social networks, capable of mobilizing themselves almost instantaneously for a
cause and to give feedback in real time or nearly so. No need to be a prophet to
understand that all our modes of governance, that the “authority” and education, that
the constitution of our common good, our consumer habits, etc., are going to be
profoundly changed, for the better or for the worse. Our terrestrial or aerial vehicles
integrate dozens of microprocessors and carry onboard millions of lines of code,
directly and indirectly, to ensure our security and optimize the resources. Originally
descriptive and qualitative, modeling has become quantitative and massively
calculatory, a precious aid to the non-trivial exploration of complex situations in
which the space of the states generated by the combinatory is immense (for a
9
memory of 1 GB this gives the colossal number 25610 ). A universal usage that
reinforces the veracity of the Church–Turing thesis.
REMARK.– We are faced with what mathematicians call singularity, a bifurcation,

and what physicists call a change of phase – a restructuration of material or even a
metamorphosis, but from which we do not know if a bee or a hornet will emerge.
We are on the edge of a watershed where, once we cross over, nothing will be as it
35 Refer to the book The Large Hadron Collider: a Marvel of Technology, EPFL Press, 2009.
was, where a new passage will appear and take shape, where the transformation is
very quickly going to become irreversible, taking into account the colossal energies
that are at stake and carried by the 9–10 billion inhabitants that will soon be present
on earth.
Today, we have all the technology to provide good systemics. We have above all
the right concepts and the right languages, such as those of abstract machines that
we know how to define with all the rigor and precision required by the problem that
needs to be resolved, which can lead to the creation of DSL/Domain Specific
Languages. We can interact and give feedback in a certain manner at a scale that
Norbert Wiener would never have imagined, with an MIT that has significantly
developed its leadership36. Individuals and community interests have become “active
units” for the first time in social history37 to borrow a good expression used by the
economist F. Perroux. Intelligence – meaning our capacity for adaptation to the
environment – can be distributed and controlled by exchanges of information, and in
doing so defuse conflicts thanks to models such as game theory that J. von Neumann
opened the door to, in particular those that model cooperation. Without cooperation,
without feedback, there is no solution to the conflicts that are unavoidably going
to appear.
Models of game theory perhaps avoided a transformation of the Cold War into a
global disaster, but we will never be certain of this38. However, what we can be sure
of is that they have added a little rationality where ideologies/ideologists had cast
doubts on the capacities of mankind to surpass fratricidal rivalries. Models such as
the “prisoner’s dilemma” would perhaps have removed N. Wiener’s doubts about
game theory39.
Programming, in other words in fact modeling and calculating, has become a

new way of reasoning, which it has taken us several decades to understand correctly
after Alan Turing and a few others had laid down the foundations40. We can imagine
machines keeping pace with humans, but what gives the logical capacity to the
machine is its programming which itself remains dependent on human intelligence
and under control of programmers. Deep Blue did not convince Kasparov, but rather
it was the programmers who programmed the IBM machine. This is something that
must never be forgotten. Learning programming, in a broad sense and for this
36 Refer to the website www.cesames.net of the authors for more information.

37 F. Perroux, Unités actives et mathématiques nouvelles, Dunod, 1975.
38 Refer to the book The Strategy of Conflict, reprinted in 1981, by the 2005 Nobel prizewinner,
T. Schelling.
39 Refer to R. Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation, 1984, available in French from Odile
Jacob, Donnant Donnant, 1992 and M. Nowak, Super Cooperators – Why Cooperation, Not
Competition, is the Key to Life, Canongate Books Ltd., 2011.
40 Refer to G. Dowek, Métamorphoses du calcul, Le Pommier, 2007.
reason, must be at the heart of training of future citizens of society known as

“digital”, in the same way as reading and multiplication tables, after the invention of
the printing press. Our future and the condition of our freedom are contained herein.
The act of programming, its “performative” aspect as linguists say, is at the heart of
the system approach.
We therefore have technology to create good systemics, but we are also in

particular going to have to do this by necessity to organize the complexity of the
world in the 21st Century, to put order, a minimum of rationality and good sense, in
what could also become a gigantic chaos of information, this time at the scale of the
planet. It is necessary to be blind and deaf to imagine that the current socioeconomic
disorders are able to continue for a long time “business as usual”, and then there will
be a deluge. Systems science teaches us that, sooner or later, any imbalance that
violates the structural invariants of the system leads to a correction in proportion to
the amplitude of the imbalance taking into account the energies at stake; the shock in
return, like a “tsunami”, can be violent if it is neither anticipated nor controlled. The
warning signs are always second-order weak signals41, undetectable by statistical
surveys. Without the theoretical model by Brout, Engler, Higgs et al., the
experimental physicists at the CERN would never have been able to discover the
Higgs boson. Here is what we need to convince ourselves of. It is not sufficient to
have a lamp or a map, it is still necessary to know where to look, which will
determine how. This is why we have the moral obligation to obtain the consent of
the wider public. What we need is a grammar to understand the world in which we
are now one of the interested parties, both subject and object, spectator and actor – a
grammar whose language, in other words our programs, is computer science
language that it is now essential to master. In addition, systemics can largely help us
to see a little more clearly. With the current state of technology and engineering
methods, there is no alternative.
1.3. Engineering in the 21st Century
In the engineering problems that are created by modern, globalized and now
massively computerized societies, a distinction needs to be made between the
necessary, which remains stable, and the contingent that can fluctuate as a function
of the environment and of external constraints (see PESTEL, section 8.3.3).
Delivering technology that will in the end be rejected by users for whatever reasons,
or that it will turn out to be impossible to maintain in the long term, or dangerous,
must from now on be considered an inexcusable mistake because it is potentially
fatal. Phenomena caused by ageing of elements, by definition unknown, must be
able to be observed, unless they are understood. It is therefore necessary to think
41 Refer to the case of the electric system.

about them right from the start of the system lifecycle, when the requirements are
expressed, and in the architecture phases, by associating all the interested parties.
For this, the system must be instrumented in such a way that it can be observed from
inside, taking its invariants into account.
The complexity that this new engineering must organize, emerged progressively
from work produced in the 1980s–1990s. It is three-fold, as indicated in Figure 1.2.
Figure 1.2. The three complexities of new engineering
Besides the complexity of technologies that has continued to develop

incessantly, for this it is sufficient to look at a latest generation microprocessor, with
its billions of components, or an assembly chain of robots with its hundreds of
machines in the automotive industry, two other complexities described as “human”
in the diagram have added themselves: one concerning engineering and its processes
under development, and one concerning the uses – meaning the semantic – made by
users that are no longer engineers like in the first systems, hence uncertainties and
human errors. For the complexity of technologies, we have available a wide range of
modeling and simulation tools that have undergone an almost exponential
development thanks to our scientific expertise, of which some is old, but above
all thanks to the formidable development of information and communication
technologies (ICT). This has no precedent in the history of techniques. The duration
of the design period of a modern airplane like the A380, or the Boeing Streamliner,
has thus been divided by two thanks to the “virtual” design offices set up by aircraft
manufacturers, which is from 10 years to less than 5 years!
Human complexity is of an entirely different order. Human rationality is

“limited” to paraphrase the title of a book by H. Simon42, and deviant behaviors
must not be excluded, as underlined in the studies that have been carried out
following the Challenger43 space shuttle disaster, without mentioning the misguided
ways of finance that have made the financial system work for the richest 1%44.
The error is human, as we often say, but it is also all-pervasive in nature. What
we need to find are rules of engineering and architecture that compensate for them,
as J. von Neumann had anticipated in his studies about reliable automatons. The
systems under development that we have dedicated several books to are
fundamentally human systems, even though they are now relatively computerized.
Engineering of the interface between users and systems, now based on a graphical
screen, has become a major theme of systemics.
These three sources of complexity interact with each other, thus creating new
combinations that need to be taken into account, taking them two by two, then three
by three, with a total of seven possibilities. The corresponding interactions can be
organized with the help of PESTEL45 factors (political, economic, technological,
ecological, legal; see Chapter 8) that we will come back to. Ignoring these factors,
allowing the complexity to stay in metastasis is equivalent to a death stop for the
system whose development cycle will not pan out to its usual term.
Hence, the analysis method proposed in this book, which is intended to be a

general method of a framework for engineering systems of systems, must allow
us to:
– discover what must necessarily be included, and to imperatively identify the
hard core of the system, its irreducible complexity, that will be its organizing center
and its spinal column; this vital information is the model of the system, its “map” to
reuse the famous expression, often misunderstood, by A. Korzybski: “The map is
42 Refer to Models of Bounded Rationality, vol. 3, MIT Press; also refer to D. Kahneman, A.
Tversky, Choices, Values and Frames, Cambridge UP; or even G. Allison, the famous
Essence of Decision, 1999.
43 Refer to D. Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision, Chicago UP; or even the series of
books by C. Morel, Les décisions absurdes.
44 Thesis defended by the Nobel prize winner J. Stiglitz in his book, Le prix de l’inégalité,
2012; also refer to the works of G. Giraud, for example Illusion financière, 2012.
45 Refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEST_analysis.
not the territory”46. This is a metaphor that tells us that reality must never be reduced
to a model, as sophisticated as it may be;
– express and communicate what has been understood to all concerned parties in
order to obtain the agreement of each of the actors in language that they understand,
according to their point of view, therefore a plurality of models whose coherence
must be managed, which is the subject of socio-dynamics. No question must remain
unanswered, avoiding the argument of authority, in creating the confidence required
to “live together” based on reciprocal goodwill and contradictory debate. This is the
ABC of the correct organization of interactions, in some way a “geometry of
cognitive entity”47 that takes into account the world as it is.
This double requirement, construction and explanation, must allow us to look at

the complexity of the situations that we are already facing, such as global warming
or the correct management of nonrenewable resources, with a good chance of
success. The somber predictions made in the Meadows report, “The Limits to
Growth”, violently contested by many economists (including in France by the
former Prime Minister R. Barre) when it was published by the Club de Rome in
1972 are now almost a reality48, above all concerning the pollution of ecosystems
because for the moment we do not repurpose the waste we produce. Its main results
could be reworked using simulation capacities with no comparison to those of the
1970s that were implemented by J. Forrester at the MIT. Non-controlled
development leads to harm such as pollution, an inconsiderate waste of fossil
energies creates imbalances that can have a global effect on the Earth’s ecosystem.
There is nothing in this that is truly original to invent, but the problem and the
questions still need to be taken in the right order. Anyone who has been confronted
by the problem of engineering of complex systems knows that the order in which the
questions need to be tackled both dictates the dimensioning and is imperative. At
this scale, any problems that are badly laid out, with uncertain data, rapidly become
an inextricable combinatory nightmare. Maturity cannot be ordained; it is
constructed step by step, by a long learning process. Cognitive psychology, the
stages by which our intelligence develops, the need for cooperation between
humans49, has in fact explained it very well. It is necessary to convince ourselves of
it, however without conceding our critical thinking and our vigilance that need to be
used at the right moment to validate or disprove the hypotheses in the model.
46 In Chapter IV, “On structure”, of his book Science and Sanity, 5th edition, 1994.
47 I have borrowed this term from the logician J.-Y. Girard; refer to his website.
48 Refer to D. Meadows et al., Beyond the Limits, 1992; and also R. Kurzweil, The
Singularity is Near, Penguin, 2005, to return to a degree of optimism, but to be manipulated
with a pinch of salt because he is the Chief scientist for Google, and besides this a hardened
militant for transhumanism and H+ humanity.
49 Refer to the book by M. Nowak, Harvard professor, Super Cooperators – Beyond the Survival
of the Fittest; Why Cooperation, Not Competition, is the Key to Life, Canongate books, 2011.
Nothing is ever acquired definitively, structures are subject to “wear”, entropy and a
laissez-faire approach mechanically fabricate undifferentiated disorder no matter
what happens. None of the natural or artificial processes escape this and everything
is reformulated because the situation itself evolves. Fate and chance are not
involved, nor are poker players, but the contingency that reshuffles the cards does
indeed have a role to play.
It must be possible to teach the method of resolving problems in complex

situations, this fifth discipline, both in major engineering schools and in business
schools, and in a general manner where decision-makers are educated, reflecting on
scenarios like those evoked in this introduction. All will be faced sooner or later
with situations where only collective intelligence will be able to give answers that
are acceptable for the masses. For this, the method must be “decontextualized” (in
computer science, we would say context free), meaning a generalization to simplify
it, so as to bring out the concepts that underlie it, but never losing the connection
with reality, which neutralized it immediately. This collective intelligence is more
than a simple addition; it is an integration of skills that emerge thanks to the
organized interactions of the various disciplinary fields, human sciences included.
The sociodynamic aspects are fundamentally in the human “energy” of large
projects, clearly brought to light by J.W. Forrester. “More is different” said the
Nobel prizewinner P. Anderson in an article that has remained famous, and this is
what we need to prepare ourselves for in sciences of engineering of open systems of
the 21st Century in which human beings, more than ever, have a large role to play.
In A. Grothendieck’s autobiography – a true genius of mathematics who died in

2014, and a re-founder of modern algebraic geometry, page 48 of Récoltes et
semailles50 – there is an entirely illustrative small text of the method to put into
practice for whoever wants to be seriously faced with the systems that surround us
on all sides: those that we create and those that are given to us by nature. We can
take it as it comes, without changing a single word, to make systemics a tool for
analysis and communication that is useful for everyone, for a common good:
“The structure of a thing is not at all something that we can ‘invent’.

We can only patiently update it, humbly find out about it, ‘discover’
it. If there is inventiveness in this work, and if it so happens that we do
the work of a blacksmith or a tireless constructor, this is not at all to
‘shape’ or to ‘build structures’. These have not waited for us before
coming into being, and to be exactly what they are! But this is in order
to express, as loyally as we can, these things that we are in the process
of discovering and finding out about, and this structure that is reticent
to reveal itself, that we are trying to sound out and to grasp with a
50 Only available on the Internet.

language that is perhaps still stuttering. Thus we are led to constantly

‘invent’ the suitable language to express more and more finely the
detailed structure of mathematical things, and to ‘construct’ the
‘theories’ that are supposed to recount what has been understood and
seen, with the help of this language, gradually and entirely. Here there
is a continuous, uninterrupted movement of coming and going,
between the apprehension of things and the expression of what is
apprehended, by a language that is refined and recreated as work goes
on, under the constant pressure of immediate requirement.”
What more can we say, we must create the grammar of this new multi-faceted
language.
Systemics, science of control and equilibrium of systems, science of the finality

and integration of processes that nature provides and in which we have the role of
interested parties, as a function of a clearly specified and assumed objective (the
heart of the model, its fundamental invariant that makes it exist as an individualized
distinct system) in a contingent environment that is locally unpredictable, but
globally deterministic and where there are rules and order like those taught to us by
physics must at last find the place that Norbert Wiener and his colleagues had
assigned to him, a place in the front row, to resolve the global problems that our
globalized and open society is now confronted by. The solutions can only be local
and cooperative. There can be no single center, because one single center is a point
of fragility that is incompatible with a robust human society faced with internal
and/or external hazards, resilient, capable of evolving without destroying itself,
meaning truly durable. Cooperate or perish, continuously adapt, this is the question,
and also the message of hope of the solution brought by systemics and its new
language that provides us with the key to how to proceed. In many ways, this
beginning of the 21st Century resembles the 1950s, full of risks and promises. If we
do not organize complexity, complexity will destroy us slowly but surely.
1.4. Education: systemics at MIT
As an example, we give a brief view of the chronology and the main changes in
teaching systems science at MIT, not by open-mouthed admiration of this famous
institution, but to encourage those who have the heavy responsibility of organizing
engineering teaching in France to reflect. The continuity of effort is impressive, with
no equivalent in France, unless we go back to the era of the beginning of the
Industrial Revolution and to the foundation of the large engineering schools – away
from the university that did not want these disciplines to be considered ancillary
(to remain polite!).
Officially founded in 1998, the ESD (Engineering Systems Division) has been entrenched
in an interdisciplinary approach to systems engineering problems over the course of decades
of development.
1948 MIT, professor N. Wiener published Cybernetics
1954 H.M. Paynter implemented the first classes in systemics
1961 MIT, Sloan School, J. Forrester published Industrial Dynamics
1971 A.H. Keil implemented the Center for Policy Alternatives
1973 Foundation of the Center for Transportation Studies
1975 Foundation of the Technology and Policy Program
1985 Creation of the Center for Technology, Policy, and Industrial

Development
1988 Launch of the leadership program for Manufacturing
1989 The MIT commission on Industrial Productivity publishes its report

“Made in America”
1991 Implementation of the doctoral school Technology, Management, and

Policy (TMP)
1993 The engineering school at MIT published Engineering with a Big E
1996 The Eagar committee recommended creation of the Engineering Systems

Division (ESD)
1996 The MIT program System Design and Management was founded
1998 Implementation of a Master of Engineering in Logistics
1998 Foundation of the Engineering Systems Division (ESD)
2000 First double-capacity chair recruited by the ESD
2004 First international symposium on systems engineering (Engineering

Systems) at the MIT
2004 Introduction to the ESD Doctoral Program incorporating the TMP

2004 Implementation of an interuniversity council for engineering systems
2008 Recruitment of two new double-expertise chairs at the ESD
2009 Merger at the ESD of the architecture and the planning schools; the ESD
division is now present in the five MIT schools
2009 The biomedical innovation center (Center for Biomedical Innovation)

at the MIT joins the ESD
2009 Second international symposium on systems engineering (Engineering

Systems) at the MIT
Box 1.2. The long continuous history of teaching systemics at MIT (the
full original version of this box is available on the authors’ website51)
In France, to have an equivalent critical mass, it is necessary to imagine a

coordinated merging of teaching at the Ecole Polytechnique and its application
colleges, in broad terms ParisTech, Ecole Centrale, including the intergroup, and
SupÉlec which have also just merged together, and business schools such as
INSEAD, HEC or ESSEC; not forgetting the CNAM and “life-long” learning. In the
past, the situation was different due to the dispersion of strengths and to “Gallic”
rivalries, but the accomplishments were impressive, at least during the 30-year post-
war boom in France, which is of principal importance, but at the cost of a
considerable waste of energy.
The digital revolution and the revolution of en masse computerization, the

omnipresence of MOOCs, is going to require revisions to the foundations of
teaching in engineering where the science of systems will occupy a principal
position. It is therefore time to “get down to it” before it is too late, to avoid
relegation.
The factor that has made the MIT what it is, amongst other factors, is a desire to
stay awake and alert.
51 Available at http://www.cesames.net/.
2
At the Origins of System Sciences:

Communication and Control
2.1. A little systemic epistemology
In his works dedicated to the philosophy of science, in particular, Science et

méthode, H. Poincaré dedicated an entire chapter to explaining what a definition
should mean, asking the question: “What is a good definition?”. He caused a scandal
by saying: “A good definition is one that is understood (by pupils, by those who
must use it, by engineers…)”, because, in effect, if this is not the case, we will not
be able to communicate, nor a fortiori to act. For H. Poincaré, intuition was
something entirely fundamental, hence his constant reminder: “What is the point of
this?”, a phrase that was repeated by L. Wittgenstein in his lectures at Cambridge:
“Don’t ask for a meaning, ask for a use”, in reference to the aphorism 3.328 of the
Tractacus: “If a sign does not mean anything, it has no meaning.” A better
expression could not be found to avoid any sterile scholasticism, in particular,
concerning systemics, with its shifting boundaries, and where circular reasonings
permanently lie in wait. By intuition, said H. Poincaré, “the mathematical world
enters into contact with reality…”. And, later: “An engineer must receive a complete
mathematical education, but what use should it be to them? Different aspects need to
be examined and quickly so; engineers have no time to be nitpicking. It is necessary,
in the complex physical objects that are available to them, that they recognize
promptly the areas where the mathematical tools that we have placed in their hands
can be applied.” Prudent and pragmatic, he recommended: “We cannot demonstrate
everything and we cannot define everything; and it will always be necessary to
apply a little intuition; it does not matter if it is done a little earlier or a little later, or
even to apply a little more or a little less of it, provided that with correct use of the
assumptions that it provides us with, we learn to reason correctly”.

Concerning the subject we have at hand, we must distinguish between the

definition of systems sciences, in this case, systemics, on the one hand, and the
definition of systems, meaning their construction processes, in what they share, on
the other hand, in the same way that we distinguish between geometry, science of
figures, their constitutive parts {types → point, straight line, plane, etc.} and their
relationships to construct the figures that are familiar to us, in a similar approach to
that taken by D. Hilbert in his work The Foundations of Geometry.
We have known, ever since Euclid and his work Elements (around 300 BCE),
that in all well-constructed theories, there are some terms that are primary elements
of the theory and that we consider to be the obvious truths. On the basis of these, we
are able to construct theorems and other elements derived from the theory. In
geometry, the point (“which has no part”, as Euclid stated), the straight line, the
plane, etc. are in this category. From here, we are able to construct all the figures
that are familiar to us: triangles, quadrilaterals, circles, parallelepipeds, spheres, etc.
and study their properties. By adding a metric, we will be able to define what an
inequality is, and establish correspondences and geometrical transformations, which
will culminate with the group theory placed in the foreground by F. Klein in the 19th
Century (refer to his work Programme d’Erlangen), and the organization of the
axioms of geometry proposed by D. Hilbert in his famous work, The Foundations of
Geometry (1899). This is also what D. Hilbert recommended to “instill order” into
the physics of his era (refer to the sixth problem in his list of 23, formulated at the
time of the symposium of mathematicians in Paris in 1900, whose grand finale was
the mathematization of quantum mechanics in the 1920s, with, amongst others von
Neumann at the helm).
If we adhere to the good practices of the scientific method1 in the way that we
present physical theories, that is to say, concerning systems sciences (a “physics of
information” according to certain physicists), we need three things: (1) one or
several descriptive formalisms, (2) a phenomenology of systems and of their
constitutive elements, including measurement instruments, in such a way as to
connect formalisms to the reality of systems that are thus observed and represented,
and (3) a validation procedure to ensure coherence of the whole entity that is
constituted in this way, that is to say, the equivalent of experiments in physics. In the
case of systems that we are studying in this book, this will be either real
experimentation or, since we have significant calculation powers, simulations of
physical processes or, in very specific cases, demonstrations, in the mathematical
sense of the word, but which will never be sufficient, which is an obligation imposed
by the principle of reality.
1 Refer to von Neumann’s conference, “Method in the physical sciences”, Œuvres complètes,
vol. VI.
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System Architecture and Complexity

Vol. 2: Contribution of Systems of

Systems Architecture. Strategy and product development

Complexity and Complex Chemo-Electric Systems Stanislaw

Complexity and Complex Thermo-Economic Systems

Advanced Testing of Systems-of-Systems, Volume 2 -

Architecture of Advanced Numerical Analysis Systems:

Architecture of Advanced Numerical Analysis Systems:

Solutions Architecture: A Modern Approach to Cloud and

Electrical Systems 2: From Diagnosis to Prognosis

ISTE Ltd John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

© ISTE Ltd 2020

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020932472

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Part 1. The Foundations of Systemics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Chapter 1. The Legacy of Norbert Wiener and the Birth

Chapter 2. At the Origins of System Sciences:

Chapter 3. The Definitions of Systemics: Integration

Chapter 4. The System and its Invariants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

Chapter 5. Generations of Systems and the System

Part 2. A World of Systems of Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

Introduction to Part 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131

Chapter 6. The Problem of Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133

Chapter 7. Dynamics of Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151

7.4. Composition of processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176

Chapter 8. Interoperability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191

Chapter 9. Fundamental Properties of Systems of Systems . . . . . . . . . 235

List of Acronyms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269

Mastering the complexity of a system fundamentally means being capable of

To thoroughly understand this last concept, let us consider, as a simple example,

These considerations can appear to be logical, or even naive, but unfortunately

Considering the integration of a heterogeneous complex system, the resultant of

The emergence of a true science of systems – systemics – that is capable of

This book by Jacques Printz is therefore an extremely important contribution to

This book has a long history!

Over the course of our respective experience, we were convinced of the

In this context, under the instigation of C. Rochet, who was in charge of a

1 Institut de la gestion publique et du développement durable (French institute for public

2 Répertoire national des certifications professionnelles – French national register of

The Foundations of Systemics

System Architecture and Complexity: Contribution of Systems of Systems to

This differentiation is the result of an operation, or an operator, in the

An entity that is an “integrated” system therefore has two aspects: (1) a

Finally, a new phenomenon to consider is the all-pervasive nature of errors. Not

The Legacy of Norbert Wiener and

Without intending to be an exhaustive historical account, this chapter provides

System Architecture and Complexity: Contribution of Systems of Systems to

REMARK.– We have voluntarily ignored the contribution made by the biologist

1.1. The birth of systemics: the facts

At the time, when N. Wiener began his reflection, a summary of the

3 For an exhaustive study, refer to the thesis by D. Pouvreau, Une histoire de la

REMARK.– In 10 seconds of freefall, a weighted object travels approximately 500 m

Using these mechanisms, amplification will be possible in a ratio of 1:100,

We also know how to “calculate” some of the fundamental mathematical

1.1.1. The idea of integration

N. Wiener’s stroke of genius is to have understood that by integrating all these

In fact, the airplane trajectory is not random because it is subject to different

In N. Wiener’s approach, anyone who uses the term interactions, implicitly