Interesting point about the MechE literature. There's a whole academic field of multidisciplinary design analysis and optimization that tries to deal with syst

Interesting point about the MechE literature. There's a whole academic field of multidisciplinary design analysis and optimization that tries to deal with systems problems. They have a whole suite of tools for coming to grips with the couplings between subsystems. I hadn't ever thought about it in terms of distributed software systems, but it definitely applies.