Complexity Challenges in Cyber Physical Systems

13The Cyber Creation of Social Structures

E. Dante Suarez¹ and Loren Demerath²

¹ School of Business, Department of Finance and Decision Sciences, Trinity University, San Antonio, TX, USA

² Department of Sociology, Centenary College of Louisiana, Shreveport, LA, USA

13.1 Introduction

The use of computer simulation has changed the way that science is done in the twenty‐first century. Computational models are currently being used to evaluate the effects of climate change, the possibility of a financial meltdown, or the probability of you buying your holiday gifts online. We argue in this chapter that the trend towards increasing reliance on these methodologies will continue apace, not only in areas where such methodologies are already commonplace, but in all aspects of research, work, and our daily lives. In this work we attempt to marry some of the insights of traditional social science with those of complexity studies and systems thinking to provide the basis for a holistic paradigm that can inform the incoming wave of Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) that will surely inundate our lives in years to come.

The popular conception of this incoming wave of computer‐oriented solutions to model our world is often encapsulated in the general and open term of Big Data (see Akoka et al. (2017) for a comprehensive view on current literature on the topic). Big Data is a concept that is usually applied loosely to reference approaches that involve vast amounts of data, complex numerical techniques, ...