روش سیستم کنترل برای توسعه پایدار و مدیریت بی ثباتی در سن جهانی شدن

The civilization of mankind in the globalization age depends heavily on advanced information technologies emerging from automation and decision expertise and their respective scientific disciplines. The broad area of social systems, being essentially human centred systems, is a cross-, inter- and multi-disciplinary challenge to the control community. Social systems of contemporary civilization are reviewed from the systems science viewpoint and on the grounds of recent developments in control science and technology. Recent developments have emphasised the social responsibility of the control community during the on-going globalization and changes from the Cold-War bipolar world to a unipolar one, on the way to mankind's multi-polar world of the future.

In the year 2002, UNESCO (2002) announced its Encyclopaedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS) as: “… a comprehensive, authoritative and integrated body of knowledge of life support systems. It is a forward-looking publication, designed as a global guide to professional practice, education, and heightened social awareness of critical life support issues….” The respective definition begins with “A life support system (LSS) is any natural or human-engineered system that furthers the life of the biosphere in a sustainable fashion.” In this context, Earth is viewed as in Fig. 1. EOLSS has included, among its 21 main themes, 10 subject categories dealing with control, decision and management topics in systems engineering, and only one deals with Physical Sciences, Engineering and Technology Resources. Further, the quality of human resources, defined via education, health, poverty, and human resource management, are pointed out in particular.It is well known, since the early days of cybernetics, that systems and control science can indeed be effectively applied to socio-economic and socio-technical systems (Buchanen, 1982 and Cuénod and Kahne, 1973), which form a category of systems (Fig. 1) that are human and society centred. This is due to the applicability of systems and control science to solving diverse problems of decision and control, management and planning (Basar & Oslder, 1999; Beniger, 1986 and Gibson et al., 1997; Vernadat, 1996), and of the stability of organizational systemic structures (Chestnut, 1984 and Coales and Seaman, 1995; Ljungqvist & Sargent, 2000; Pete, Pattipati, Kleinman & Levchuk, 1998; Wagner, 1994). However, it should be noted (Dimirovski, 2001b and Mansour, 2001) that this broad category of systems is not amenable to pure mathematical modelling and pure maths-analytical study but rather to a combination of methods and relevant scientific disciplines (also, see Axelrod, 1997 and Bitanti and Picci, 1996; Goicoechea, Hanson & Duckstein, 1982; Kreps, 1995, Neck, 2005 and Petit, 1990). To this date, many system-science based studies related to social systems have assumed a fixed, stable background. This would imply that a number of society factors can safely be overlooked or cannot be accounted for by quantifiable methods. However, by implying a static model of the system and its proximity environment, these assumptions are contrary to the facts observed and thus unsound. Sound assumptions have to observe that (i) the global environment is changing (e.g., the per capita resource availability is declining); and (ii) if not addressed, these factors may exacerbate international instability and could trigger new forms and modes of global and regional instability. For instance, in the 20th century, a number of globally undertaken actions to reduce socio-economic imbalances in fact postponed problem solutions rather than creating alternative social behaviour likely to reduce the underlying problems. Such circumstances call for new paradigms for studying the social effects of technology, in general, and automation, control, and systems engineering technology, in particular. Currently, the prevailing paradigm for studying the effects of technological change is based on the assumption of phenomena that have diminished in the recent past. At the same time, modern media has raised personal expectations for more people than ever before. Questions have arisen, as discussed further in the sequel: • whether it is possible to distribute the perceived benefits of new technologies as rapidly as the demand for these benefits is increasing; • since new technologies place new demands on the environment, can these demands be met, given the serious environmental and resource considerations? Often the consequences accompanying each new advance have by far exceeded early expectations. Profound social developments have been created by advances once viewed as curiosities or even as “toys” of individuals. The rest of this report is structured as follows. Section 2 describes some characteristics of contemporary social systems. Section 3 is devoted to the generic issues of modelling and control in such systems. Section 4 reports on recent trends in various social systems. Section 5 addresses some ethical issues. Conclusions and references follow thereafter.

The broad area of social systems, which are essentially human and society centred systems, has been overviewed and shown to be a cross-, inter- and multi-disciplinary challenge to systems and control researchers for quite some time. Social systems in modern civilization, which is currently undergoing its globalization age, are reviewed from the systems science point of view. Recent developments have put a new emphasis on the social responsibility of the control and automation field during the on-going changes from the Cold-War bipolar world to a unipolar one on the way to mankind's multi-polar world of the future. It may well be argued that the so-called globalization process is not just a contemporary phenomenon but rather a logical, perhaps a natural, stage in the historical development of mankind and its societies due to the developed technological potentials. On the other hand, the real-life world-wide experience during the last two decades or so has clearly demonstrated that technology cannot be considered as neutral within given society environments. In the globalization age, the focus should be on innovated systems approaches, employing new paradigms, to combined knowledge and technology transfer world-wide in general, and to developing countries in particular, that may remedy some of the negative aspects of globalization. Contemporary societies are more or less all networked, and particularly so are the main infrastructure systems of business, energy, food, water supply and transportation. Moreover, some of these are already networked on either continental or global scales, which in turn requires more demanding and sophisticated control, coordination and management methodologies and techniques. Hence engineering sciences and technologies cannot be considered as neutral because ultimately all system engineering creations are some kind of socio-economic system; and this is especially the case for trans-national ones. Furthermore, all the contemporary challenges to global, national and regional development are tied to managing international stability and peace, thus creating non-causal systems that cannot be tackled by traditional control theories. The focus has to be shifted to innovative systems approaches, employing new paradigms, to combined knowledge and technology transfer world-wide. Nowadays, the sophistication of the control field encompasses the synergy of computational power and advanced systems and control theories, thereby enabling new systems engineering methodologies which exploit combined qualitative (linguistic) information in addition to quantitative (numerical) information as an alternative representation of non-linear and uncertain dynamical processes. These emerging soft-computing modelling techniques have contributed to the paradigm of combined qualitative–quantitative information processing. Thus the challenge of managing relevant scientific activities and enhancing world-wide research in combined knowledge and technology transfer for development is made even more delicate and important. “… We have to walk the path from the tree of knowledge to the control of destiny.”—Jean-Marie Lehn, Nobel Prize laureate, on the occasion of the announcement of Encyclopaedia of Life Support Systems. However, if the control of destiny is hopefully to succeed, remedial actions generated by mankind's science and technology must operate efficiently on a time scale in line with the complex dynamics of the contemporary economy based globalization of world-wide networked societies.