International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

The process by which the system accumulates reserves of matter, energy and/or information and becomes able to delay and select its responses to stimuli.

P. VENDRYES explained the importance of storing reserves for the operation and the maintenance of dynamic stability in systems in general (1942).

He took his insight from the example of physiological reserves of the living being, as for example glycogen or fats, which allow for the intervention of functional regulations and the maintenance of biological functions within satisfying limits of oscillations, in front of the variations of the flows incoming from the environment.

It is, in fact, that capacity to store reserves which allows organisms to acquire their autonomy in relation to this environment, to organize their own internal milieu (or "invironment") and to maintain what Claude BERNARD named "the constants of the internal milieu", also studied later on (1932) by Walter CANNON under the name of homeostasis (1963).

The fundamental potentiality of the stored reserves is that they are counter-random.

VENDRYES extended in his last works these views to historical, social and economic (including firms) systems (1981).

No system could do for long without such reserves, which are needed to counteract perturbations from the environment.

However, the storage process is not free. Stores are structures that must be constructed and maintained. For example, H.T. ODUM writes, refering himself to the storage of energy: "… such work requires a dispersal of some potential energy into heat… If the storing is done at the maximum possible rate, then 50 percent must be delivered into the heat sink" (1971, p.38-39).