Abstract
Most of the urgent problems that need to be addressed in the twenty-first century involve open systems. Typical examples are problems related to earth sustainability, life and health, natural disasters, the security and dependability of huge man-made systems, policy making, and so forth. These problems cannot be solved by using conventional scientific approach. In this paper, I propose a new scientific methodology called Open Systems Science. Open Systems Science addresses a problem in an open system by iteratively identifying the most appropriate boundary of the embedding system in order to obtain a satisfactory result. That is to say, in Open Systems Science, we put more emphasis on relationships with surrounding systems. This methodology has been successfully applied in the creation of new research areas that address open system problems in field such as biology, healthcare, food, agriculture, and software/systems engineering.
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Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Hiroaki Kitano, Kazuhiro Sakurada, Masatoshi Funabashi, Kaoru Yoshida, Takahiro Sasaki, and all the members of Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc., as well as all the members of the DEOS project for their invaluable comments and suggestions in the course of our work together.
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Tokoro, M. (2017). Open Systems Science: A Challenge to Open Systems Problems. In: Bourgine, P., Collet, P., Parrend, P. (eds) First Complex Systems Digital Campus World E-Conference 2015. Springer Proceedings in Complexity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45901-1_25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45901-1_25
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