Sysinformatics & Systems Mimicry: New Fields Emerging from a “Science” of Systems Processes Engineering

This paper gives an overview of the Systems Processes-Patterns/Systems Pathology (SP3) project of the INCOSE SSWG (Systems Science Working Group) because we see two new specialties arising from that research program. The project is based on research conducted over the last 300 years on natural systems in the seven natural sciences (astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology, biology, math and computers).1 It seeks to unify that knowledge with systems thinking from human and social systems research. The resulting integrated knowledge base (KB) is overwhelming, even when abstracted to only those 50 principles and pathologies that tell us something experimentally about how natural systems work or don’t work. The SP3 project collects facts in 25 categories (each described in this paper) and hundreds of Linkage Propositions (LPs) that explain how 55 systems processes influence each other to maintain systems health. We suggest a new approach called sysinformatics modeled after the bioinformatics courses that today prepare workers for genetics and systems biology. We need corresponding courses in sysinformatics to prepare workers in systems science, systems engineering, computer-based modeling, and new fields such as sustainability studies. The need for bioinformatics resulted from a range of advances in new experimental tools and techniques that led to terabytes of data that required meaningful analysis to bring from the lab bench to the hospital bed. Similarly, sysinformatics would attempt to make more meaningful the mountains of data and relations resulting from a new science of systems. It will require active participation of the computer sciences, engineering specialties, and deep mathematics. Overall, it would help in understanding of how systems processes work and don’t work. Sysinformatics would be a rigorously transdisciplinary field aimed at the discovery, storage, retrieval, organization, classification, and analysis of systems science data. It would stimulate discovery of new tools and algorithms for analysis of data, encourage invention of new ways to present and display data in ways more easily or intuitively meaningful to humans (like the Circos maps of genomics that interpret many different whole genome changes). Sysinformatics would add data mining, AI, simulation image processing, a range of algorithms, new companies and computerized tools to the toolboxes of practicing systems engineers. This paper describes initial similarities and differences between bioinformatics and sysinformatics. It also introduces “systems mimicry” as a potential new specialty and suggests similarities and differences between biomimicry and systems mimicry.