Simplicity is Complex

This book investigates the characteristics of simple versuscomplex systems, and what the properties of a cyber-physicalsystem design are that contribute to an effectiveimplementation and make the system understandable, simple touse, and easy to maintain. The targeted audience is engineers,managers and advanced students who are involved in the designof cyber-physical systems and are willing to spend some timeoutside the silo of their daily work in order to widen theirbackground and appreciation for the pervasive problems ofsystem complexity. In the past, design of a process-control system(now called cyber-physical systems) was more of an art than anengineering endeavor. The software technology of that time wasconcerned primarily with functional correctness and did not paymuch attention to the temporal dimension of programexecution, which is as important as functional correctness whena physical process must be controlled. In the ensuing years,many problems in the design of cyber-physical systems weresimplified. But with an increase in the functional requirementsand system size, the complexity problems have appeared againin a different disguise. A sound understanding of the complexityproblem requires some insight in cognition, human problemsolving, psychology, and parts of philosophy. This book presents the essence of the author's thinking aboutcomplexity, accumulated over the past forty years.