Natural Systems Complex Systems - Systems of Systems The latest generation MBSE application

A seemingly trivial question that hides the result of 4 billion years of biological evolution that led to the appearance on our planet of homeothermic organisms that, precisely because of their ability to maintain a nearly constant body temperature, had greater evolutionary chances than others, thus becoming ubiquitous.

Homeothermic organisms have populated the entire planet, from the polar ice caps to the equatorial zones, on land, sea and sky.

Homo Sapiens sapiens appeared on the planet about 250,000 years ago, was already an organism belonging to the primate mammals and homeothermic. This means that the biological system of thermoregulation, induced by the evolutionary forging forces, took 3 billion 900 million and 750 thousand years to perfect itself.

There are hundreds of thousands of these systems, some more evident, others encapsulated in the cellular cytoplasmic physiology, all absolutely complex systems whose detailed dynamics are still unknown to the researchers who study them.

Starting from the first living form that appeared on the planet, only in the first half of the 18th century, thanks to scientists such as Joseph Black, our Lazzaro Spallanzani, considered the scientific father of artificial insemination and the Frenchman Claude Bernard, was the biochemical explanation of thermoregulation given.

Doing a quick calculation, it took Homo Sapiens sapiens 248,000 years from its appearance to reach an intellectual level capable of these scientific speculations.

Man, therefore, through the "gift" of reason and/or thanks to certain characteristics, such as the opposable thumb, but above all the development of language, succeeded in a relatively short time compared to that of biological evolution to create a parallel scientific-cultural evolution.

The results are astonishing.

But above all, it is astonishing how quickly scientific evolution has created engineering systems inspired by biological systems, greatly increasing their performance.

Engineering, biology, medicine, physics, chemistry are the sciences that underlie the progress of systems generated by man.

Often in the 19th century and in the last century the orientation towards “performance” led to the production of systems with very high impacts and not only environmental ones, in short it led to unsustainable systems.

What should intrigue us is how we can approach the quality of an engineering system currently designed by Man in a short time with that of a biological system that is the result of a 4 billion year evolution.

Let's take a closer look at the thermoregulation system typical of homeothermic organisms.

It is evident to anyone who has studied a little biochemistry that the complexity is so extreme that it is difficult to schematize it to describe it.

Using terms typical of systems engineering literature, if we consider the thermoregulation system as SOI (System of Interest), the presence of interactions with various other systems is evident, which if in turn focused as SOI highlight the fact that we are faced with a real SOS (Systems of Systems).

A very important system related to the thermoregulation system is the muscle contraction system through which, with muscle tremors (shivers), the organism increases its temperature by burning energy taken from ATP, while to lower the temperature, the vasodilation and sweating systems intervene.

In the SOI muscle contraction system, proteins such as Actin and Myosin compete to degrade ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate) into ADP (Adenosine Diphosphate) and release inorganic phosphate, obtaining energy for muscle contraction given by the interaction between the myosin heads and the actin filaments.

The description, which is completely superficial and in some respects open to attack by any physiologist, has been reported in this way for provocative purposes.

I estimate that there are specialized texts of about 300 pages to describe the details of muscle contraction, but the amazing thing is that the level of complexity of the description has no limit other than that of placing a limit on research.

The thermoregulation system can be, without fear of contradiction, considered a successful biological system that has allowed those who possess it to colonize planet Earth by protecting the organisms themselves from environmental climatic variations.

Would it be utopian to generate a functional digital twin of such a system?

It would already be wonderful to be able to digitally reproduce a micro-portion of it and then simulate its behavior, for example, by subjecting the system to extreme temperature parameters.

What if we had this very technology?

Yes, a technology that allows us to generate a functional digital twin, be careful not to confuse 3D digital models that can certainly be useful but that only constitute a partial view of a system.

If we had this technology we could use it to generate new systems by composing them and connecting them to other systems involved or impacted by the functioning of the SOI, we could evaluate errors by correcting them, we could size the functional components arriving at the real prototyping phase, significantly reducing the risk of building a failed physical prototype.

And then, without leaving any limits to the imagination, after having physically built the system, control its dynamics in real time through specific sensors.

We could also improve existing systems generated by Man by redesigning them as they are, just like in the example of muscle contraction with the difference that in this case we could improve them and make them evolve.

We would certainly find man-made systems much more flawed than natural ones.

A technology of this kind and a correct systemic approach recognized by the international INCOSE community such as Systems Thinking would certainly mitigate the gap between the extraordinary precision and complexity of biological systems resulting from the evolution of the same name and that of systems generated by Man in terms of environmental, social, political, economic and ethical sustainability.

Therefore, the identification of multidisciplinary approach methodologies such as Systems Engineering, especially in its MBSE declination, and current digital technologies can and must be used as noble means for the generation of increasingly complex and sustainable systems based on a dutiful study of natural systems by enlightened engineers, entrepreneurs and scientists.

Pushing beyond the “imaginative” theory, we are surprised when we first intuit and then understand that the technology to move into practice actually exists.

For a few years I have been investigating, together with colleagues, clients and friends, which platforms we can base some experiments on.

Functionally, the market offers various ones, I am a firm supporter of notations that allow the reduction of ambiguities, reasoning by models is certainly more intuitive and simple, if you then use standard notations you really achieve the maximum result.

UML and SysML (v 2.0 coming out soon) allow us to describe with models the behaviors of more or less complex systems, but, there is a “but” I challenge anyone to obtain a vision of the system in its entirety through a single intelligible model.

I really believe that this condition constitutes the limiting factor for a massive adoption of MBSE.

Giant models, broken up here and there, and if the goal is called SoS (Systems Of Systems), instead of a monitor, a planetarium-type structure from an astronomical observatory would be needed to project onto.

In reality, we would need a universe where we can glue together all the models made with the various technologies and tools, and then make them gravitate according to the logic that Systems Engineers, in their role as orchestrators, create, modify or destroy until their systems express success even before their physical engineering.

Logical models designed with market tools outside of this universe will continue to be the protagonists of the concept stages, while those enclosed in the “planetarium” (universe) will be able to be viewed from light years away to have a global vision of them or from close distances to be able to act on them in a point-by-point manner.

A sort of digital twin of systems of systems that maps systems of real systems already engineered or yet to be physically generated.

And so our Systems Engineer Space Rider will be able to travel in the system universe as long as the logic is realizable outside the planetarium or universe.

What is described is not utopia even if paraphrasing it seems science fiction.

There are technologies that take this kind of approach, cutting-edge technologies in development that I hope to be able to write about soon, in fact sooner than you might imagine.