Model-Application

Abstract

Increasingly the scientific community is being urged towards multidisciplinary action on a project basis and the forces fuelling this drive are similar to those embedded in the systems concept. The basic hypothesis is that a system—whether defined as a physiological system for a plant or the economic system of a nation—cannot be properly understood by an ad hoc set of studies of the various elements that make up the system. The interrelationships between the components are so important and the variability created by the total environment in which the defined system operates so persuasive that always the whole is more complex than the sum of the individual parts. Within this concept it will be evident that the definition of the system under study is crucial (Anderson, 1974), particularly, as we have stressed throughout this book, the precise location of the system’s boundary. Outside the boundary the ‘environment’ in which the system operates is both uncertain and difficult to predict while inside the boundary we have perceived a hierarchical structure of subsystems and subsubsystems each with a similar autonomy to the major system under study. Thus the subsystems are considered to interact only through their conjugation in a higher system and we have seen in earlier chapters some of the implications of this concept on our modelling work.