BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

About

The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

LIFE TIME 1)

The span of survivance of a component in a system or subsystem.

According to R. ROSEN, in an arbitrary system M ".. each component Mi of M has a finite life-time which we shall denote by ui; by this we mean that, after Mi has been in operation for an interval of time ui it shall cease to function." (1974b, p.31).

This is a very general property of components in complex systems (living systems and organizations, and in an analogous way, machines). The replacement of components by other components of the same type is an absolute necessity for these systems and is done in living systems through hypercycles and organizational closure.

In order to obtain some predictive power about the life time of systems or their components and their probable breakdown time, P. WINIWARTER and C. CEMPEL have defined "life symptoms" and "life curves" in relation to wear. An "auto-regressive stochastic process" is observed. (1992, p.9-34).

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]


We thank the following partners for making the open access of this volume possible: