Handling Complexity of a Model in System Design: Framework, Formalism and Metrics

Current systems complexity has reached a degree that requires addressing conception and design issues while taking into account all the necessary aspects. Therefore, one of the main challenges is the way complex system models are specified and designed. The exponential growing effort, cost, and time investment during the phase of modeling a complex systems emphasize the need for a paradigm, a framework, and an environment to handle the system model complexity. For that, it is necessary to understand the expectations of the human user of the model and his limits. This paper highlights the requirements a system model needs to fulfill to meet human user expectations. For that, it is necessary to be able to measure the system model complexity. This paper highlights the requirements a model needs to fulfill to match human user expectations, and suggests a graph-based formalism for modeling complex systems. Finally, a way to measure system model structural complexity based on Shannon theory of information is proposed.