ABSTRACT
Systems science is an interdisciplinary field of studies that covers a broad range of areas that include nature, society, science, engineering, and medicine. It covers well-defined fields such as complex systems, cybernetics, dynamical systems and chaos, control theory, operational research, ecology, and many others. In view of the diversity of fields covered, systems theory has developed from different fields and its applications extend from microscopic scale to very large scale. Systems theory and cybernetics have often been used synonymously, although cybernetics refers to a subset of systems that involve feedback loops. The advantage of the systems theory approach in problem solving is that it does not require a priori understanding of the detailed mechanisms of the underlying processes in the system. The chapter also provides an overview of on key concepts discussed in this book.
