New Methods for Analysis of Systems-of-Systems and Policy

The Power of Systems Theory, Crowd Sourcing and Data Management

Book chapter (2012)
Department
Infrastructures, Systems and Services (TPM) (TU Delft)
Copyright: © 2012 Creative Commons BY
DOI: https://doi.org/doi:10.5772/28796
More Info
expand_more

Published Date

31-03-2012

Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Source:

System of Systems

Faculty

Technology, Policy and Management

Department

Infrastructures, Systems and Services

Abstract

Our world is a complex socio-technical system-of-systems (Chappin & Dijkema, 2007; Nikolic, 2009). Embedded within the geological, chemical and biological planetary context, the physical infrastructures, such as power grids or transport networks span the globe with energy and material flows. Social networks in the form of global commerce and the Internet blanket the planet in information flows. While parts of these global social and technical systems have been consciously engineered and managed, the overall system-of-systems (SoS) is emergent: it has no central coordinator or manager. The emergence of this socio-technical SoS has not been without consequences: the human species is currently facing a series of global challenges, such as resource depletion, environmental pollution and climate change. Tackling these issues requires active policy and management of those socio-technical SoS. But how are we to design policies if policy makers and managers have a limited span of control over small parts of the global system of systems?