General Systems Theory

General Systems Theory: A Knowledge Domain in Engineering Systems
Fleming Ray October 25, 2000 ESD.83 Research Seminar in Engineering Systems Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT OpenCourseWare 1. Introduction General Systems Theory (GST) arose out of several disciplines, including biology, mathematics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As the discipline has emerged, its goal haschanged. Von Bertalanffy began thinking about GST in the 1930s, but did not articulate his vision until 1954 at the AAAS conference. Originally, his goal was to get biologically minded scientists to consider their work from a holistic perspective. As his thoughts evolved, the goal became to construct a mechanism for reducing duplication of theoretical effort in the sciences. It was proposed that GSTcould serve as a unifying theoretical construct for all of the sciences. To this end, mathematicians and philosophers became engaged in creating a rigorous theory. This paper traces the evolution of GST, including its institutional history, and its current areas of use. 2. Definition General Systems Theory arose out of the efforts of researchers who were searching for homologies between work in thebiological, physical, and social sciences. Different definitions of GST have propagated, depending upon the background and focus of the researcher. According to Klir [1972], "General Systems Theory in the broadest senserefers to a collection of general concepts, principles, tools, problems, methods, and techniques associated with systems." In this case, a system is "an arrangement of certaincomponents so interrelated as to form a whole." This systems approach arose in contrast to the Newtonian method of separating an object into its component parts and trying to understand the behavior of the object by understanding the properties of the individual parts while ignoring their interactions. A related definition is given by Miller [1978], "General systems theory is a set of relateddefinitions, assumptions, and propositions which deal with reality as an integrated hierarchy of organizations of matter and energy." The mathematics of General Systems Theory is based largely upon set theory. Using these tools, formal system components and their relationships can be defined. Basic concepts are introduced axiomatically, and the system's properties and behavior can be investigated in aprecise manner. General Systems Theory is particularly applicable to systems with goal seeking behavior; biological and social systems are the primary domains of such goal seeking behavior. Although precise, the model of the system often has to be simplified to high level of abstraction to make the computations tractable. 3. Institutional History and Development of GST General Systems Theory, along withother accompanying theories of systems such as cybernetics and control theory, came to prominence after World War II. There are multiple reasons for such concurrent emergence; important contributing factors included the creation of new systems tools, the presence of important work by multiple investigators in cybernetics, control theory, information theory and General Systems Theory, and thepresence of computational capacity. General Systems Theory arose in the 1950s when other mathematically oriented systems techniques were also popular. Von Bertalanffy began thinking of General Systems Theory in the 1930s, but due to the unfavorable intellectual climate, did not air his ideas until much later [von Bertalanffy, 1968]. In 1954, Boulding, an economist, Rapoport, a biomathematician,Gerard, a physiologist, and von Bertalanffy, a biologist, founded the Society for General Systems Theory at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Later, the organization changed its name

to the Society for General Systems Research. The journal General Systems was launched at the same time to serve as the organ for the society. The purpose of the...