Systems engineering: old ideas, new potential

The world appears to us as complex and difficult to comprehend. Millennia of accumulated human experience were necessary to assemble the picture of our world that we have today. The purpose of general, systems theory, is to formulate concepts and methods for analysing complex situations, processes and structures irrespective of their specific nature. At times the concepts of general systems theory appear too general to be useful. In this context it is important to remember that the purpose of these concepts is to provide us with a generic skeleton that we can adapt to the specific situation under analysis. It is like a master plan that lays out the general architecture for a construction. It helps in finding the most appropriate overall layout from which we can proceed with confidence to work out the details. We will show in this paper, how we can solve problems in general.