No matter what field you are working in or studying, Advanced Systems Thinking, Engineering, and Management offers you a comprehensive understanding of systems ideas and methods to help you achieve unmatched success with your challenging projects. This unique resource helps you add a systems-scientific grounding to systems engineering enterprises, showing you how to solve intractable problems, design systems to accommodate complex environments, and manage both creative and operational systems. You learn how to conceive, design and manage a systems engineering process for optimal results.

The book is filled with examples and case studies from a wide range of areas, from integrated transport systems, security systems, and defense procurement, to missile defense architectures, famine relief, and managing markets. This innovative reference introduces a generic systems lifecycle theory that helps you understand how systems form, persist and decay, and presents a 5-layer classification for systems engineering. You discover how to use a generic reference model that allows systems of all types to be addressed within a common framework. Moreover, the book reveals how architecture is used to create system emergent properties, capabilities and behaviors.

In a nutshell, this book is about systems. This book is written for those thinkers and practitioners who have come to realize that while the whole is becoming more and more interdependent parts display choice and behave independently, and that paradoxes are the most potent challenge of emergent realities.

With a practical orientation and yet a profound theoretical depth, the book offers an operational handle on the whole by introducing an elaborate scheme called iterative design. The iterative design explicitly recognizes that choice is at the heart of human development. Development is the capacity to choose; design is a vehicle for enhancement of choice and holistic thinking. ‘Designers’, in this book, seek to choose rather than predict the future. They try to understand rational, emotional, and cultural dimensions of choice and to produce a design that satisfies a multitude of functions. They learn how to use what they already know and also about how to learn what they need to know.