The development of a concept for a system is a key step toward creating the system's architecture. Most previous concept development approaches focus on the procedures for the conceptual design activity—the sequence of activities and tasks. Our work is motivated by the desire to elaborate in details the notional content of a system concept and to provide the means of encoding and analyzing it in a digital environment. The objective of this work is to develop a system concept representation framework that can systematically represent the concept's constituents, their definitions, and interconnections. In order to demonstrate the utility of this framework, we have conducted three studies: mapped eight selected US patents, nine selected urban architectural patterns, and three selected software patterns to the framework. Patents, urban architectural patterns, and software patterns each contain a rich body of knowledge about the system they describe, and therefore they must logically contain a description of the concepts underlying them. We show that the main features of proposed framework can be found in patents, urban architectural patterns, and software patterns. The major utility of the framework is that it provides the means to encode existing system concepts and to inform the conceptual design of new systems, contributing to the INCOSE Model‐Based Conceptual Design initiative.

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Understanding emergence is an important goal of system thinking, as it can express both desirable and negative properties of products and systems. Emergence has also a special importance as it has a direct link to the performance of products and systems, and thus has a direct relationship with the quality of life and thus sustainability in our societies. Emergence and system thinking are closely related to engineering design methodologies. In our paper, we develop a more precise definition of emergence through the core principles of systems complementarity that are similarity, irreducibility and sophisticated relationships expressed through the interfaces between systems, subsystems or product components.We demonstrate the utility of the approach based on an aircraft pylon case study by presenting a detailed definition of an interface design matrix and analyse how pylon subsystems influence emergence. The results have shown that the product can be perfectly represented by a model-based approach supporting interface management and the assessment of system complementarity. In turn, this approach allows to go beyond a qualitative definition of emergence, as it proposes a quantitative approach through the assessment of complementarity.

DSMs and related matrices are commonly used to represent system interfaces, which is closely associated with a need to decompose systems into their elements. However, besides the importance of managing the decomposed elements of systems, the systems engineer should also possess a capability to manage other systems' relationships. In this paper we are focusing on the DSM capability to represent three fundamental system entities and four structural relationships, as they are defined in the Object-Process Methodology. We argue that DSM is an appropriate tool to facilitate a systematic approach to digital transformation of objects and processes through the different stages of the design process. We use a coffee maker as a case study demonstrating how each entity flows from an abstract environment to a more detailed one following specific structural relationships.

RobVingerhoeds 2[0000-0002-2339-4853] , Brendan P. Sullivan 3[0000-0002-6798-1187] , Monica Rossi 3[0000- 0003-4971-2837] , Yana Brovar 4[0000-0001-9923-9772] , Yaroslav Menshenin 4[0000-0002-1547-9857] , Clement Fortin 4[0000-0002-9761-3107] , Benoit Eynard 5[0000- 0002-5393-4363] .