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Importance of Integration

Introduction
Society has the need to integrate. People build and integrate products and
services. Specialists engineer complicated products and services, while systems
engineers work with many domain specialists (e.g., physicists, biologists, chemists, sociologists, economists, psychiatrists, information specialists, corporate
managers, workers, and decision makers) to tackle complex systems and system
of systems. In essence, building systems is nothing more than integrating parts
into a whole. Objects interact with other objects through energy, matter, material wealth, and information (EMMI). EMMI expresses the interactions
between objects. To span the types of interactions and integrations that are
observed in engineering, biology, sociology, and economics (essentially all
things natural and human-built), the forms of interaction need to cover all
that we do and all that we see. Different forms of enablers are or can be similar, can embody one another, and can exist in various combinations simultaneously (Burgin 2003). To the most common sets of the three forms of EMMI
(energy, matter, and information) we add material wealth as a further initiator
of an object’s mechanism (broadly speaking). The actions of interaction and
objects are covered in more detail in Chapter 2. Many authors* discuss interactions based on various inputs: energy and matter (Sage and Armstrong
2000); energy and information (Morris and Pinto 2004); energy, material, and
information (Wieringa 1996; Oliver 1997; Kossiakoff 2003); and energy, matter,
and information (Miller 1978; Bornemann and Wenzel 2006; White 2007;
Edwards 2009; Tan et al. 2009; Wells and Sage 2009). Our reference to EMMI
will be used throughout this book to represent the inputs that drive mechanisms to transform EMMI into outputs as well as into the losses of EMMI
needed to achieve those outputs. Outputs are the performances exhibited by
the object that transforms the input EMMI.
Society has a need for knowledge about the fundamentals of integration
and the use of integrated physical and intellectual entities (referred to as
“objects”). Generally speaking, physical objects are those entities that have
* Only a few of the more recent references are indicated.
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