Centre for Systems and Services Sciences

Systems and Services Sciences

Complex systems are an integral part of our constructed world. As we come to rely increasingly on these systems for all aspects of our lives it would be reasonable if we could claim a solid understanding as to how these can be specified, constructed and controlled. With few exceptions this is not possible. Large systems projects fail in both public and private sectors. At the same time, these projects play expanding roles in government and commercial strategy, demanding budgets to match.

A fundamental problem in understanding, designing and managing real-world complex systems is the need to work fluidly across disciplines. Increasing academic specialisation has tended to work against this, something that is often reflected in industrial research and development.

Combining disciplines as diverse as psychology, mathematics and engineering is difficult. Factors such as language, funding models, publication practices and problem sets all mitigate against the necessary mixture of disciplines coming together to improve our understanding of complex systems, their applications and their limitations.

We need to do something about this. Whether motivated by a desire to develop cost effective, repeatable complex systems, to ground academic research, to seek out new problems or just research funding, there is a need to bring disciplines together in a constructive and creative way.

A group of academic and industrial organisations have recognised the need for a combination of pre-competitive research, consortium brokerage, standards and publication in this area. Grounding these problems in the area of services research - prime examples of large, complex and economically significant systems makes both industrial and academic sense.

The Centre

The primary purpose of the centre is to advance the development and integration of the sciences that underpin the successful analysis, design and control of complex systems characterised by the requirements of services. Specifically we expect the centre to

• Organise regular hybrid industrial-government-academic research meetings and colloquia;
  
• Publish advances in the area of Systems and Services Sciences through a refereed journal;
  
• Identify and encourage pre- and near-competitive research;
  
• Act as a `dating agency' for academic, government and industrial partnerships;
  
• Establish systems and services sciences as a recognised research discipline;
  
• Establish and champion standards in systems analysis, specification, development and management in process and training;
• Act as a validator of expertise of competence in systems and services sciences;
  
• Act as a repository for sample and standard problem sets and research results.

Inaugural Meeting

The inaugural meeting was held at Hewlett-Packard's European Laboratories in Bristol, England on December 6th 2005. Working Group meetings in each of these areas have been established, and a full technical meeting is being held in Grenoble, France in September 2006.