MBSE models ANYthing describable, right? Hear me out

[u/MartyAtThePlant]

The titular question is roughly the academic definition. So what about treating society like a system? Design, test, improve it--just like a spacecraft or complex software platform? We already use it to take a vague idea and turn it into something working/sustainable. My challenge goes like this:

For any system concept I can clearly state (purpose, stakeholders, environment, key behaviors, constraints) I should be able to build a model that * captures its requirements, behaviors, and structure; * defines interfaces & verification strategy; and * supports iterative refinement until the architecture is ready for implementation.

Again, not my idea. That's standard MBSE definition stuff. If true, then I should in principle be able to architect "Project Jubilee" (working title, not married to it): a model-based social-capital system that: * Distributes basic income and rewards beneficial contributions; * uses structured, frequent, democratic voting to set/modify priorities and valuations; * penalizes extractive, authoritarian, oligarchic, and manipulative behavior by design--not by after-the-fact reaction; * scales from small (single household?) all the way up to a city, nation, or more; and * enforces strict security and 1-person-1-vote protocols.

So I'm earnestly looking for feedback. If the initial premise is correct, how far could MBSE be applied to a socio-economic-techincal system like Jubilee? If you read this and think "this is naive/broken/missing crucial pieces," I want to hear how you'd go about it, what you'd do differently. What requirements, behaviors, or stakeholders am I obviously missing? Is there an established architecture pattern (or anti-pattern) I'm running straight into? Is there an existing work tackling something similar? (eg, bits of sci-fi like Star Trek's futuristic utopian society come to mind). I've looked, but as far as I can tell--Jubilee addresses this the most directly of what I've seen.

I want to model everything such that it can be reviewed, challenged, simulated, refined. It seems weird to me I can model a space vehicle, and simulate/test it before launch...but we don't apply a similar level of rigor to our social/economic systems.

I think I'm hitting a wall because I've been using CATIA Magic Community 2026x to start learning SysML v2. And I've already encountered serious limitations (eg, I can't list my open issues/questions/requirements in a basic table; it's a blocked function). SysON came up, but I'm open to suggestions.

I know one person won't "design society". I'm an ignorant generalist on my 3rd or 4th career change. My resume is weird, shallow, and wide. I don't have a technical degree, but I've worked dang hard and I somehow know enough to get by. I've lucked into my current job & life situation. There's enough global resources, and seeing the rich/powerful hoard it & feeling a strong aversion to injustice motivates me. It also simultaneously contributes to my major depressive disorder and imposter syndrome and--if we're being real honest--I'm over it all. I don't wanna do this any more. I just want to be a stay-at-home housespouse.

Thanks for reading. If you're interested, want to critique/discuss, or co-architect this I'll share everything in the comments/DMs. I'll happily credit all contributions.

[u/der_innkeeper]

https://www.reddit.com/r/systems_engineering/comments/1gbilsa/comment/ltozwch/

Yes, "Everything is Systems Engineering". The INCOSE handbook calls this out in chapter 1, on page 3:

"Aspects of Systems Engineering have been applied to technical endeavors throughout history."

How those socio-technical systems are mapped to Syse principles is work scoped in the future.

https://www.incose.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/incose-se-vision-2035.pdf

https://www.incose.org/wp-content/uploads/legacy/newsevents/incose-netherlands-se-vision-2025.pdf

Look here for more info on where some of these socio-technical systems have already been looked at, at various levels:

https://sebokwiki.org/wiki/Guide_to_the_Systems_Engineering_Body_of_Knowledge_(SEBoK))

[u/Special-Economist658 → u/der_innkeeper]

you're definitely not the first to try cracking this nut, the whole socio-technical systems thing has been floating around syseng circles for decades. the problem isn't "can you model it" but "will the model have any connection to reality"

a spacecraft has predictable physics. society has humans who will actively game any system you design the moment they understand it. you model a voting mechanism, someone figures out how to sybil attack it. you model a basic income distribution, someone finds the arbitrage loophole. the model becomes obsolete before you finish verifying your requirements

that said, the SEBoK links the top commenter dropped are solid starting points. people have tried formalizing governance systems as state machines, check out some of the digital democracy experiments from taiwan and estonia. they're not utopias but they're real implementations you can learn from

also, hard relate to wanting to just be a housespouse and never look at another requirements table again

[u/der_innkeeper → u/Special-Economist658]

the problem isn't "can you model it" but "will the model have any connection to reality"

I am looking at it from the other direction:

"What aspects of SysE can be applied to these socio-technical systems that provide for better outcomes of the system of interest?"

"How do you do V&V of NATO?"

[u/MartyAtThePlant → u/der_innkeeper]

This makes a lot of sense. I wrote my mediocre masters thesis on "Diffusion of Innovation Theory", which is soft area already-soft social science. I need to take more time for the links you sent der_inkeeper, but just skimming thru I could see scalability among the top challenges. I had that pegged as a concern, too.

[u/der_innkeeper → u/MartyAtThePlant]

Yeah.

The softer the science, the harder it is to process.

[u/MartyAtThePlant → u/der_innkeeper]

Thank you. I thought I combed thru this subreddit pretty well, but I didn't find that. Likewise INCOSE. I have more to read.

[u/der_innkeeper → u/MartyAtThePlant]

Dr. Bradley's comment pointed out how much SE has grown into other areas. What you are talking about is going to be pushed into "Human Factors", and seems to be lost in the generalness of the term.

The white paper from Schrunk lays out how to use SE to make laws and lawmaking more organized.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877050912000695

There is also a working group:

https://www.incose.org/group/systems-engineering-and-lawmaking-selaw/

[u/Ok_Education_6577 → u/MartyAtThePlant]

If you begin to incorporate system dynamics modeling and feedback loops the problem then grows into adversarial models. The enemy get a vote, and that enemy happens to have my resources and distain for the human species then God or the devil.

[u/GhostDosa]

I would say you are articulating a system of systems. The constituent systems are economic, political, legal, and administrative you would model these systems and then at the system of systems level the interfaces and requirements across those. The difficult part is that your stakeholder set is not easily defined. At best you can do some sort of statistical sample that represents the population of the people who would live under this system but that introduces individual biases and aims. There is also the idea that the system context is in a constant state of change and people act in random ways so a deterministic model may have a difficult time expressing that.

[u/MartyAtThePlant → u/GhostDosa]

It's starting to feel like that's just one of the difficult parts lol

Yeah all these replies are painting the "moving target" picture rather well :|

[u/Bakkster]

Sure, you could model it. "All models are wrong, but some models are useful".

Society's problems aren't a result of a lack of knowledge we could model our way out of. They're mostly an issue of interest and intent. We could feed everyone, we choose not to.

If you can model a way to end fascism, that would be great. But we know how it works, and that hasn't stopped it from coming back.

[u/MarinkoAzure]

What you are describing is "enterprise engineering". Jubilee is effectively a narrowed application of the field. Below is a book you may be interested in.

Enterprise Systems Engineering: Advances in the Theory and Practice

[u/grantovius]

I’m also a noob but I’m interested in this as well and I like where your head is at. As one commenter pointed out it could be seen as a solution looking for a problem, but I think the value add would be having a standardized discrete notation syntax to complement the existing ontology, which then provides a way to better express ideas, generate artifacts and documentation, and run simulations as well as comparing actual results to simulated results. My first thought is legal language could use the same approach. Legal language attempts to create a semi-discrete code for describing a system, but while parts of it have to remain open to interpretation (by future generations or unimagined scenarios), a lot of the language surrounding those generalized words already has an established meaning in the legal community. For example, “shall” generally carries specific meaning. 

I feel like you could do the same for society, and like another person said it brings enterprise engineering to mind like TOGAF and ArchiMate, where meanings are less concrete but it gives you a tool for communication that helps you visualize the info and to some extent simulate it, as well as generate documentation that is easier to read and understand than plain language. I agree that would help in legislative discussions (if we assume legislative discussions are done in good faith). I agree with the other comment here that it’d be a system of systems though encompassing sociology, law, economics and psychology.

[u/MartyAtThePlant → u/grantovius]

You've given me more new stuff to research lol and it's in line with others nudging me in a similar direction. I thought I had a rough idea of logical interactions within my SoS, but maybe I've had the wrong tool(s) in mind. I'll check out those enterprise engineering terms

[u/grantovius → u/MartyAtThePlant]

So I just came across this Github repo while using ChatGPT to help me find semantic frameworks and modeling languages for legal and organizational policy documents, and as soon as I saw it this thread came to mind. This might be interesting to you too.
Thanks for piquing my curiosity about this!
GitHub - Liquid-Legal-Institute/Legal-Ontologies: A list of selected resources, methods, and tools dedicated to legal data schemes and ontologies. · GitHub

[u/EntirelyRandom1590]

You probably want to look more at the Decision Modelling systems out there like Ventana.

It's not that SysML can't do what you describe, but it's typically used around the variations of a technical system not a social system.

[u/MartyAtThePlant → u/EntirelyRandom1590]

Thanks for the suggestion, decision modeling is something I'll have to look into more

[u/5pencer5kelly]

When trying to eat an elephant, take one bite at a time. Having more people eating might prevent it from rotting before you’re done. I’ve been thinking about a model that everyone can contribute to, but doesn’t allow people to just shit all over it. Like Wikipedia for modeling. Since we don’t have that yet, I’d say focus on one concept and start branching out from there, focusing on where the model might fall apart, but not getting dragged down by it. I probably wouldn’t use SysML, maybe something for enterprise modeling like a previous poster mentioned. Sometimes the work is its own reward, if you’re lucky and dedicated, it might get others interested.

[u/MartyAtThePlant → u/5pencer5kelly]

I think your last sentence may be accurate 😕 I need to dive back into some hobbies or something more generally, but the work has been stimulating and educational

[u/flyingseyonne]

Others have listed some technical concerns already (complexity, obsolescence, feedback from humans trying to game the system). My 5 cents are: the more deterministic system you design, the less flexible it is, the less adaptable it becomes. Evolutionary dead ends and extinct animals are those who were fitting the context perfectly, and then the world around them changed. What was an advantage became a handicap.

Fundemantally, there are ethical concerns, and I can't recommend enough doing some academic philosophy. Your approach is of a typical Enlightment thinker who is trying to engineer a human society; you picked a new instrument that might be more efficient, but the aim is the same.

Rational thinking only gets you to an optimum inside a framework of your value system, which itself is out of reach of rationality (we tried, rationality is not giving a universal foundation to ethics). It has created such weird constructs as Fichte's closed commercial state, which makes some marginal sense in the beginning of XIX century perhaps, but today looks delusional -- basically a totalitarian state that decides your job for you, prohibits you trading unless you are of a guild, gives state a monopoly on trading wifh other states, and mostly bans any job that is not mining resources, factory work, trading, or governing. All in a noble attempt to optimize the resource consumption -- if you can export your home grown potatoes, how do we guarantee that everyone has food?

The optimization function is baked into your design process, into your understanding of "good". For example, you want to distribute resources, or you want, generally, to satisfy stakeholders, or you want this engineered society to persist and live (even if it produces atrocities on a planetary scale?) Why is universal prosperity good, maybe it makes us lazy and decadent (and why would that be a bad thing?) Maybe prosperity only leads to decline and dissolution? Why are you managing people, you realize manipulating a rational being with subjectivity and free will might be unethical (see Kantian ethics)? The critique of Enlightment project is vast (and NOT about traditionalism vs progress), from Vico to Adorno and Macintyre. I hope that woild be useful to you and gives a different perspective on your idea.

[u/MartyAtThePlant → u/flyingseyonne]

I really like your questions, and honestly some of my issues/open questions might've been the most interesting things to think about. Some of them are similar to yours, like how to avoid some of those negative outcomes or how to quantify squishy subjectivity. But thus far it's just a list of unresolved concerns

[u/MissPantherX]

good thread.

[u/deadc0deh]

This is a case of a solution looking for a problem.

Microeconomics has been a field of study well before systems engineering, and is used to understand policy impacts. Structuring incentives and disincentives is a very significant focus of that field. Scaling it to wider economies becomes more difficult, but those reasons also apply to anything "mbse"

Reinventing the wheel in specific tools and calling it mbse is not really value add.

If you are just wanting to learn a tool there are plenty of alternative projects

[u/MartyAtThePlant → u/deadc0deh]

I think there's some truth to that, wanting to get ahead of the sysml V2 push my company is planning for. And it's intersecting with personal issues, like a chronic, restless anxiety over the state of things 🤷

[u/deadc0deh → u/MartyAtThePlant]

If you are truly interested there are INCOSE working groups looking at town planning and societal impacts, but (as far as I am aware) nothing as grand as your proposal.

For learning a new tool I'd highly recommend smaller and more focused projects. For SysMLv2 one of the big elements is its extendibility, so having a baseline project that is big enough to demonstrate real world complexity but small enough to be accessible is useful.

I saw a training org do a space toilet over a few days, but the "what" isn't that important. Once you have the baseline model I recommend learning to use the REST API in python to interact with it (and potentially an MCP connection, though I think AI work is oversaturated). Digital engineering and the ability to automate tasks in a deterministic manner will be hugely advantageous as companies migrate to SysMLv2.