Complexity Engineering Harnessing Emergent Phenomena as Opportunities for Engineering

Despite a lot of knowledge about complex systems the application of this knowledge to the engineering domain remains difficult. Efforts are scattered over many scientific and engineering disciplines. In this contribution we would like to motivate the union of these efforts by establishing complexity engineering as a discipline. We will motivate this initiative and show a few aspects that we consider important to arrive with this goal. After a historically inspired call for unification of the field we will present one of the most fundamental problems engineers are facing when deploying complex systems knowledge, what leads us to the formulation of the self-organization – specification tradeoff principle. Then, we dicuss what we consider central ingredients to complexity engineering: i) theory, ii) universal principles, iii) implementation substrates, iv) designing, programming and controlling methodologies v) collecting and sharing of experience in complexity engineering.