8.1.2 Overrepresented and Underrepresented Patterns in System Architectures Across Diverse Engineering Systems

Abstract

AbstractRecent years have witnessed new research interest in the study of complex systems architectures, in domains like biological systems, social networks etc. Seminal works covering each of these systems have appeared in high impact journals like Nature, Science, etc. Unifying principles have emerged and helped in gaining new understanding in a domain by extending the understanding gained in other domains. These developments in complex systems open up possibilities in the research into architectures of complex engineering systems. Complex engineering systems are synthesized from large number of components giving it a physical architecture. We abstract the physical architecture of different engineering systems as a network/graph, where the nodes/vertices correspond to components and edges correspond to interconnections between them. Complex systems research in biology defines motifs as recurring sub‐graphs from which the network is built. They also argue motifs as simple building blocks of complex networks, offering a way to understand the basic functionality of a system. In this paper, we explore 32 arbitrarily chosen engineering systems architectures for motifs. We discover motifs within each system and also interesting motif templates across systems.