This paper describes a strategy for modeling and engineering complex e-business systems with built-in quality of adaptiveness. The paper explains the philosophical and scientific foundations for research findings and for the proposed strategy. After ascertaining that complexity relates to the fact that higher levels of organization manifest features not predictable from the lower ones, the paper uses a holonic approach to science that reconciles reductionism and holism. The strategy is centered on a six-layer meta-architecture (called PCBMER and described comprehensively elsewhere). The meta-architecture facilitates development of adaptive systems such that property of emergence is controlled and supplanted by the property of resultance.
Leszek A. Maciaszek