What is not broken (cit. Henry Ford), undoubtedly true this statement of the founder of the famous automobile company of Detroit, but technological progress advances, the market is increasingly demanding and systems increase in complexity and consequently they "rupt" more frequently. In short, we can no longer afford to be minimalist systems engineers with the claim to meet current market demands.
The impact of technology on the environment has always been a topic for the fact that it has not yet found the appropriate developments so that environmental interference by complex systems can be satisfactory under control. In fact, it would already be a success to be able to predict the inevitable impacts precisely in order to be able to think, from the stage of concept, to careful measures for the environment.
The ethical aspects of the multidisciplinary approach of Systems Engineering should sometimes lead us to the stop of projects whose impacts on the environment today cannot be imagined and at least foreseen.
It is certainly really difficult to determine how many and what control systems should be developed to make “safe” a complex system with a high environmental impact.
Without going into detail, it is enough to think of a nuclear power plant, a mobile telephone network or a railway network for having at least an immediate idea, though not of detail, of the impacts that these works as complex systems can have on the environment and on the population itself, in good and evil.
If we went back fifty years, the systems mentioned above would have a less complex, less impact on the environment or even null as systems at the time not existing.
Certainly today we are more aware of the danger of the effects of complex systems on the environment and consequently also the research to stem these phenomena of interference is more in-depth even if it is difficult to determine the proportion of “efficiency” to be provided in research on the control SOI regarding the complexity of the SOI in its entirety.
Man is creating complex systems in an environment that he does not know completely using knowledge that comes from a cultural evolution that started with the appearance of Homo sapiens on the earth surface or about 250,000 years ago when our ancestors received the gift of reason.
The origin of life on earth dates back to about 4 billion years ago, Man as an organism endowed with reason appears only 250,000 years ago, this means that biological evolution has generated complex organisms physiologically similar to Man and Man himself employing 3 billion 999 million and 750 thousand years.
An idea to be able to think about how much commitment it is necessary to foresee in the design of a control system, could be to analyze a biological system not generated by cultural evolution but by the biological one.
The comparison between a complex system generated by man and a “natural” is definitely an enterprise not recently, but only some notions of physiology are sufficient to understand how far Homo sapiens from being able to maintain under control the complex systems generated by him through control SOIs with the same effectiveness with which the evolutionary forging forces have defined control biological SOIs through billions of years of evolution.
We consider a biological system as a system of interest in its entirety, if we move the focus on its control SOIs of absolutely interesting: thermoregulation typical of homeothermic organisms or at constant body temperature, regulation of glucose concentration in blood, healing, reaction to stimuli in case of sudden danger.
They are all systems of absolute complexity that have been refined through billions of years and that have constituted the main managers of the success of the evolutionary lines arrived to our days.
The control and regulation systems are therefore evidenced as the main ones responsible for the continuation of the life of organisms on our planet, it is evident that the systems generated by Man have logics deriving from the observation of the physical and chemical phenomena of the environment, introducing game variable force and parameters that test the adaptability of organisms both animal and plant.
One of the most complex regulation and control systems in physiology is the endocrine hormonal one whose biochemistry is not yet completely clear to scientists who discover new aspects every day. For example, we think of the secretion of adrenaline by the adrenal glands that happens every time there is an sudden difficulty that needs a sudden reaction of our organism, on the other hand the adrenaline could not remain in the circle for a long time because it could damage the organism itself and therefore appropriate metabolic pathways that define the half-life of this hormone (catecholamine) in about 5 minutes before being degraded.
This is a typical example of the temporary use of an element and its demolition that shows the physiological balance at the initial point. We think of a man driving a car typical example of human/machine interaction, where in normal conditions the activation of the braking system after gradual pressure on the pedal allows the stop of the car without risk.
Things change in case of emergency, for example, due to a sudden obstacle that the driver must avoid stopping the car because without room for other manoeuvre. Here, therefore, that the driver's reaction is no longer mediated by the telencephalic court and subcortical activity but takes place for reflex arc for spinal activity. That is when a series of sudden sensory stimuli suddenly occurs in a very narrow temporal arc the reaction is “intentionive” immediately and unintentionally, the reaction happens by affecting the nearest nervous center available without affecting the higher levels of the SNC. This mechanism is almost always successful if we consider the interaction man/natural system, but in this case the interaction is between man driver of a complex system he himself conceived is less, the sudden reaction of the driver who presses the brake pedal thoroughly follows the block of the wheels of the car that make the braking insufficient and the car goes in collision with the obstacle.
But finally with the progress of the technique of electronics and sensory comes the anti-locking system ABS that is nothing but a regulation SOI that temporarily intervenes to ensure that the braking emergency falls back, functionally comparable from the secretion of adrenaline and its metabolization For each complex system generated by the technique this situation should be replicated thus creating a strong impact control on other systems. It is therefore in the Concept Stage of the realization of a complex system that it is necessary to take into consideration the impacts and then to focus on the realization of a control SOI that has as an end that to attenuate as much as possible the effects of the impacts themselves.
It will not always be possible to mitigate the impacts and at this point the ethical aspects of Systems Engineering must be taken into account that on the basis of a non-sustainability they will have to induce Systems Engineers to suspend the project by referring it to when the technology will be able to obtain the same results with a different SOI or when it will be able to achieve a proper control SOI.
In the past too often we wanted to achieve challenging objectives without too much thinking of the consequences, the awareness of the "errors" committed must be the basis to generate complex systems of success through a correct balance of forces spent in the assessment of environmental risks and in the design of properly dimensioned control SOI.
