System Architecture and Complexity: Contribution of Systems of Systems to Systems Thinking

The emergence of a true systemic science - the systemic one - capable of rigorously addressing the many problems posed by the design and management of the evolution of modern complex systems is therefore urgently needed if wants to be able to provide satisfactory answers to the many profoundly systemic challenges that humanity will have to face at the dawn of the third millennium. This emergence is of course not easy because one can easily understand that the development of the systemic is mechanically confronted with all the classical disciplines which can all pretend to bring part of the explanations necessary to the understanding of a system and which do not naturally see a good eye a new discipline claim to encompass them in a holistic approach … The book of Jacques Printz is therefore an extremely important contribution to this new emerging scientific and technical discipline: it is indeed first of all one of the very few serious works published in French and offering a good introduction to the systemic. It gives an extremely broad vision of this field, taking a thread given by the architecture of systems, in other words by the part of the systemic that is interested in the structure of systems and their design processes, which allows everyone to fully understand the issues and issues of the systemic. We can only encourage the reader to draw all the quintessence of the masterful work of Jacques Printz which mixes historical reminders explaining how the systemic emerged, introduction to key concepts of the systemic and practical examples to understand the nature and the scope of the ideas introduced.