Conceptual Hierarchies of System Architecture/Architecting and Operations Research Paradigms

Operation research and system architecture/architecting are two fields to tackle complexity. Both of them are widely used in various discipline. However, architecture/architecting is most dominant than OR to tackle complex problems. Survey on system architecture/architecting literature, show the lack of process of creating architecture. In this paper we want to compare fundamental philosophy of both in methodology level to show usefulness of Operation research approaches to create theory for system architecting/architecture. According to this, using categorical logic, different Operation research approaches- Hard Operation research, soft Operation research and critical Operation research - except Postmodern Operation research can be useful tools to system architecture/architecting. So in first step categorical propositions of system architecture/architecting and Operation research paradigms was extracted and then based on categorical logic they were compared. In addition, LISP programming language was used to standardize the writing. Finally, a summary of the results was presented in the form of a conceptual hierarchies of architecting and Operation research adapted from the conceptual hierarchies introduced by Paul Thagard. This conceptual hierarchies is representation of the relation between Operation research approaches and system architecting.