An Attempt at Explicating the Relationship between Knowledge, Systems and Engineering

Software systems often serve as the agents of operation for both enterprise systems and embedded systems. Engineering such systems is a knowledge-centric activity. A clear understanding of the relationship between knowledge, systems and engineering can help us to establish firm theoretical foundations for software and systems engineering. Currently we have a strong intuitive understanding of how knowledge flows into engineering, while our understanding of the relationship between systems and knowledge is part explicit and part tacit. A symptom of this is that we have difficulty in building unified models of large systems such as telescopes and enterprises that span multiple knowledge domains and viewpoints. We are able to build multiple models covering various aspects and particular viewpoints. However, we have challenges in integrating them into a single unified model. Another symptom is that software and systems engineering practice are widely viewed as empirical fields, without sufficiently strong theoretical foundations. This work attempts to explicate and synthesize our common intuitive understanding in this space to develop a conceptual model of the relationships. It then explores the validity of this model by examining the extent to which it is able to explain and illuminate current engineering practices and issues. This is an initial strawman version of the model, presented with a view to obtaining feedback and inputs from the community.