PROBLEM SPACE DOMAIN AS A FORMAL SEMANTIC WORLD MODEL

Abstract Systems engineers reason about the problem domain, yet the discipline lacks a formally interpretable representation of the problem space itself. In current practice, reasoning often proceeds directly from stakeholder goals to prescriptive artifacts, leaving foundational assumptions about the operational environment, admissible interactions, and contextual conditions implicit or prematurely embedded in architectures and requirements. This paper formalizes the problem space as a semantic world model defined prior to requirements and architectural commitments. We define interactions as directed relations that carry flows only when the receiving side admits them; we define a system boundary as a semantic partition of a universe of entities that fixes what is treated as internal, external, and environmental; and we define an operational context as the environmental input that selects which structurally available interactions become active. Outcomes are then defined as context‐grounded propositions with truth values determined by the realized interaction set, enabling explicit traceability to stakeholder goals without embedding solution bias. Results establish criteria for a rigorous problem space domain so that practitioners can justify design choices against what is true of the operational world and arrive at defensibly valid solutions (not merely solutions that “work”). Finally, the paper concludes with a case study discussion showing how researchers can build, and automate the theory on a shared semantic foundation independent of any particular architecture or prior implementation.