Read our new engineering safety factfiles: Safely managing the emergent properties of complex systems

To develop a system that is safe, a sufficient understanding of its properties is needed. For a complex system, this must include emergent properties, without which understanding is not complete and confidence in its safety cannot be claimed.

This complexity is not determined by the size of the system or the number of system elements and interactions but is instead determined by the nature of these interactions and their relationships with other systems and the environment. These factors make complex systems difficult to understand and their behaviour difficult to predict.

Our Engineering Safety Policy Panel has produced a flyer to help managers and engineers understand complexity and emergent properties to guide systems more clearly and safely through their life cycles. In doing so there is greater potential to develop safe products that are fit for purpose, produced efficiently, and supported effectively.

Organisations should strive to understand complexity and emergent properties; early understanding of system-of-systems context, boundaries, interfaces, and interactions is critical across the full life cycle.

More analysis could always be done before making decisions, but resources are rarely available, therefore engineers need to judge when understanding can turn into action and effort should be devoted to deciding when understanding is sufficient to act.

Management and engineering should be integrated to fully support each other’s endeavours to build a coherent approach to developing and supporting complex systems throughout their life cycles.