System Patterns in Engineering and Science

Human life is experienced as recurring system patterns – the informal events of everyday living, expression of creativity and aesthetic experiences of the arts, organized observation and discovery in the physical sciences, and technically engineering the systemic improvement of the human condition. Patterns have been expressed and analyzed across these diverse domains in the languages native to each. In the case of science and engineering, the subject of this chapter, explicit formal methods for discovering, synthesizing, representing, analyzing, and applying patterns, have reached great heights, transforming human life over three centuries. In spite of successes, diversity of language and perspective across individual physical science and engineering disciplines has masked the common thread of system patterns running through these scientific and engineering works. The more recent attention to the science and engineering of systems in general, including explicit models of general systems, illuminates the nature of general system patterns and their fundamental contribution to representation and progress in science and engineering of systems. In addition to providing a unifying perspective to historical accomplishments of specialized disciplines, system patterns also simplify the complexity of existing engineering environments while advancing ability to develop new scientific and engineering disciplines for more complex domains, including markets, networks, distribution systems, the Internet of Things, communities, and the innovation process itself. This chapter and references provide an actionable perspective for readers interested in this revolution. A key lesson of this chapter is that system patterns reduce the challenge of accomplishing nearly any goal in the life of systems.