A Phenomenal Basis for Hybrid Modelling

This work in progress extends the new mechanical philosophy from science to engineering. Engineering is the practice of organising the design and construction of artifices that satisfy needs in real-world contexts. This work shows how artifices can be described in terms of their mechanisms and composed through their observable phenomena. Typically, the engineering of real system requires descriptions in many different languages: software components will be described in code; sensors and actuators in terms of their physical and electronic characteristics; plant in terms of differential equations, perhaps. Another aspect of this work, then, to construct a formal framework so that diverse description languages can be used to characterise sub-mechanisms. The work is situated in Problem Oriented Engineering, a design theoretic framework engineering defined by the first two authors.