The Quest for Unified Concept in Describing Complex Systems

Various incidents such as the Y2K or the power-grid outages served as a channel to increase the awareness for better protecting the national critical infrastructures. However, everyday seems to bring new and complex concepts or performance characteristics that describe computers and communications systems or their services. These qualitative/quantitative characteristic keep growing without limits and need to be clarified. This paper provides clear insights to the general problem of understanding these concepts and their relationship by integrating them into a one structure. It lays the foundation for achieving a unified design model for these characteristics, which will formulate the basic issues to develop unified quantitative approaches, tools, or evaluation methods. The expected outcomes would benefit many different entities in enhancing the design or optimizing it for achieving better systems and networks.