The Art of Systems Architecting is for present and future systems architects, for experienced engineers and managers interested in extending their expertise beyond a single field, and for individuals concerned with creating, building, or using complex systems. This innovative text directly addresses the problems inherent in creating and building new and complex systems for electronics, computer, software, aerospace, and government purposes. Today's challenges demand that a new class of tools, heuristic and qualitative, be added to the familiar ones of analysis and optimization. Today's architecting must handle the types of systems that have been unknown until very recently, e.g., systems that are very high-quality, real-time, closed-loop, reconfigurable, interactive, software-intensive, and, for all practical purposes, autonomous. The Art of Systems Architecting provides these tools by introducing the non-qualitative architectural concepts of systems thinking, heuristics, tensions, feedback architectures, modeling, and progressive design. Move beyond the traditional science of systems engineering and into the complementary art of architecting. It's all waiting for you in this one-of-a-kind book.