Introduction

Abstract

Strictly speaking, “cybernetics” deals with the art of managing (or of governing), you manage something, say a “system”, and very earlier the researches in cybernetics have been splitted into two parts: namely automatic control theory and applications on the one hand, and systems science on the other hand. But whilst the purpose of automatic control is well defined and its results were quite convincing, we cannot say that it is the same for systems science. As a matter of fact, to the best of our understanding, the content of this research area has never been exactly defined, or at least, there is no common agreement about what it should be. In such a manner that, very earlier, this term turned to be somethink like a bag where one could put anything such as fuzzy sets, information, artificial intelligence, computer science, graph theory, control, problems of organization and structure, and the like.

Systems are not in Nature, but in Man’s mind

Claude Bernard