Conceptual Modeling of Complex Artifacts: principles, past and modern models

Concepts are prime tools to describe a technical system, an organization and the products and processes of an industrial domain. Models and designs use a myriad of concepts - some of them quite complex.
How to design concepts to describe artifacts like a clinic or a communications Network?
How to conceive a complex artifact - its many aspects, characteristics, structures and functions?
And if many concepts must fit together in one model like the pieces of a puzzle: How to design a tool kit of concepts?
This story tells the quest for concepts.