Reference no: EM133353429
Question: For this activity, locate what you think would be a system as described by the following. Once you its been located, provide a link to it. As part of the task, describe what you have located and discuss why selected that particular system.
A Basic View of Systems
The most basic ideas of a system whole can be found in both Western and Eastern philosophy. Many philosophers have considered notions of holism; that ideas, people or things must be considered in relation to the things around them to be fully understood (M'Pherson 1974).
One influential systems science definition of a system comes from general system theory (GST):
"A System is a set of elements in interaction." (Bertalanffy 1968)
The parts of a system may be conceptual organizations of ideas in symbolic form or real objects. GST considers abstract systems to contain only conceptual elements and concrete systems to contain at least two elements that are real objects, e.g. people, information, software and physical artifacts, etc.
Similar ideas of wholeness can be found in systems engineering literature. For example:
We believe that the essence of a system is 'togetherness', the drawing together of various parts and the relationships they form in order to produce a new whole... (Boardman and Sauser 2008).
The cohesive interactions between a set of parts, (Hitchins 2009, 59-63), allow us to identify a system boundary and defined what membership of the system means. For closed systems all aspects of the system exist within this boundary. This idea is useful for abstract systems and for some theoretical system descriptions.
The boundary of an open systems defines those elements and relationships which can be considered part of the system and those which describe the interactions across the boundary between system elements and elements in the environment . The relationships between the various elements of an open system can be understood as a combination of the system structure and behavior. The structure of a system describes a set of system elements and the allowable relationships between them. System behavior refers to the effects or outcomes produced when an instance of the system interacts with its environment. An allowable configuration of the relationships between elements is referred to as a system state. A stable system is one which returns to its original, or another, state following a disturbance in the environment.
The identification of a system and its boundary is ultimately the choice of the observer. This may be through observation and classification of sets of elements as systems, through an abstract conceptualisation of one or more possible boundaries and relationships in a given situation, or a mixture of both concrete and conceptual thinking. This underlines the fact that any particular identification of a system is a human construct used to help make better sense of a set of things and to share that understanding with others if needed.
Many natural, social, and man-made things can be better understood by describing them as open systems. One of the reasons we find the idea of systems useful is that it is possible to identify shared concepts which apply to systems, and give useful insights into them, independently of the kinds of elements they are made up of. The ideas of structure, behavior and state are examples of such concepts. The identification of these shared system ideas, is the basis for Systems Thinking and their use in developing theories and approaches in a wide range of fields of study the system sciences.
Systems Engineering (SE), and a number of other Related Disciplines also use systems concepts, patterns and models in the creation of useful outcomes or things. The concept of a network of open systems created, sustained and used to achieve a purpose within one or more environments is a powerful model that can be used to understand many complex real world situations and provide a basis for effective problem solving.