A System boundary is topologically defined as the set of system components which have connections both “inside” and “outside” of the system: to other system elements and to its Environment.
This purely topological definition means a system boundary does not need to be “a smooth manifold (line or surface) including all the elements of the system” – it can be “fuzzy”Bunge 1992, 215 .
It also allows for the fact that “the organizational boundaries of living systems are open and flexible”Kirchhoff et al. (2018), 9 and the interpretation of a system as a processThis aligns a Friston-informed systems view with Stacey’s Complex Responsive Processes of Relating (Stacey 2006). or “temporally extended whole”Kirchhoff et al. (2018), 9 which lives in a state space .
A system boundary can be described as a Markov Blanket.
References
- Bunge (1992): “System Boundary”
- Kirchhoff et al. (2018): “The Markov blankets of life: autonomy, active inference and the free energy principle”
- Stacey (2006): Complex Responsive Processes in Organizations