The Cast Project: Experiences and Future Perspectives.

The origin of Systems Theory lays in the kind of complex problems experienced by engineers (specifically in the field of communications and control) and scientists (in biology and ecology) in the mid of the 20th century. Then it became obvious, that the usual mathematical modeling concepts based on analysis (differential equations) and linear algebra (linear equations and matrices) were not any more appropriate. New mathematical methods in dealing with actual problems in formal modeling tasks were required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]