Portal:Systems science

The Solar System is the gravitationally bound system of the Sun and the objects that orbit it. It was formed about 4.6 billion years ago when a dense region of a molecular cloud collapsed, forming the Sun and a protoplanetary disc. The Sun is a typical star that maintains a balanced equilibrium by the fusion of hydrogen into helium at its core, releasing this energy from its outer photosphere. Astronomers classify it as a G-type main-sequence star.

The largest objects that orbit the Sun are the eight planets. In order from the Sun, they are four terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars); two gas giants (Jupiter and Saturn); and two ice giants (Uranus and Neptune). All terrestrial planets have solid surfaces. Inversely, all giant planets do not have a definite surface, as they are mainly composed of gases and liquids. Over 99.86% of the Solar System's mass is in the Sun and nearly 90% of the remaining mass is in Jupiter and Saturn. (Full article...)

The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is a means of organizing system development activities based on system and product decompositions. The systems engineering process produces system and product descriptions. These product architectures, together with associated services (e.g., program management, systems engineering, etc.) are organized and depicted in a hierarchical tree-like structure that is the WBS.

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Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 – February 9, 2001) was an American political scientist whose work also influenced the fields of computer science, economics, and cognitive psychology. His primary research interest was decision-making within organizations and he is best known for the theories of "bounded rationality" and "satisficing". He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1978 and the Turing Award in computer science in 1975. His research was noted for its interdisciplinary nature, spanning the fields of cognitive science, computer science, public administration, management, and political science. He was at Carnegie Mellon University for most of his career, from 1949 to 2001, where he helped found the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, one of the first such departments in the world.

Notably, Simon was among the pioneers of several modern-day scientific domains such as artificial intelligence, information processing, decision-making, problem-solving, organization theory, and complex systems. He was among the earliest to analyze the architecture of complexity and to propose a preferential attachment mechanism to explain power law distributions. (Full article...)

• ... that the Austrian American Heinz von Foerster in 1960 in Science magazine stated, that the human population would reach "infinity" and he proposed a formula for predicting future population growth.
• ... that the American biologist Christopher Langton in the late 1980s is one of the founders of the field of artificial life.
• ... that a multi-agent system (MAS) is a system composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents, which can be used to solve problems which are impossible for monolithic system to solve.
• ... that the Yugoslavian Mihajlo D. Mesarovic in 1970s wanted to provide a unified and formalized mathematical approach to all major systems concepts.