Complex Systems Sciences as a Foundation for Systems Engineers

This paper introduces what is meant by a complex system, and shows how looking at systems as complex, organic systems helps to engineer the complex interconnected “systems of systems” of the twenty-first century. To the extent that we understand and can apply them to engineering, complexity theory and the sciences related to complex systems can provide research results that allow us to predict characteristics of the systems we are working with. For example, we can predict that the relationship between numbers of events and size of events will be a power law if a network has been created by growth with preferential attachment to more connected nodes. We can also predict that the network will have specific types of security vulnerabilities, and can identify protection strategies that should be instituted to defeat certain types of easy attacks. These concepts would be surprises without complex systems science.