TABLE OF CONTENTS We have seen that any referent may be represented as a system, and a system may be classified by construction and by time scale. This chapter and the next are devoted to the discussion of the constructional view.
As we know, a black box system represents the referent by a set of interrelated attributes, each attribute representing a selected characteristic of the referent. Figure 2.4, repeated here for convenience, shows the mapping of the reality of the referent into its representation as a black box system.
We have defined the generic concept of system as a set of interrelated elements, and in chapter 4 stated this definition formally as
If S is a finite system, its element set is finite, and so is the interrelation set defined over elements of E.
Interpreting the generic system definition of expression 6.1 for the referent as a whole, we obtain the black box representation:
| where | E B stands for the set of attributes |
| and | R B for the set of interrelations over elements of E B. |
For an n-element attribute set E B = {a 1, a 2, , a n}, and for an m element interrelation set R B = {r c, r t, r 1, r 2, , r m-2}. R B includes the mandatory co-attribute relation r c, asserting that...
