Emergent Behavior in Complex Systems Engineering

Chapter 10APPLIED COMPLEXITY SCIENCE: ENABLING EMERGENCE THROUGH HEURISTICS AND SIMULATIONS

Michael D. Norman¹, Matthew T.K. Koehler¹, and Robert Pitsko²

¹The MITRE Corporation, Bedford, MA, USA

²The MITRE Corporation, McLean, VA, USA

INTRODUCTION – A COARSE-GRAINED LOOK

Overview

This chapter is an attempt to create a practical synthesis of complexity science and traditional engineering: introduces a set of heuristics to engineer for emergence, explores a number of them with a simulation of unmanned vehicle (UxV) swarms, and provides taxonomy to understand the levels of autonomy in engineered UxVs.

The chapter is organized into five main sections:

• Introduction – A Coarse-Grained Look section¹ introduces the fundamental concepts of complex systems, many of which occur in the natural world, and how they may be united with traditional engineering concepts by leveraging observations and research from the field of complexity science,
• Definitions and a Taxonomy for Applied Complexity Science section provides definitions for concepts such as complex systems and emergence and presents a framework for using simulation to inform systems engineering (SE),
• Heuristics for Applying Complexity Science to Engineer for Emergence section introduces heuristics for applying complexity science to engineer systems for emergence,
• Unmanned Autonomous Vehicle (UxV) Swarms section presents an unmanned vehicle swarm case as an exemplar for the integration of simulation and engineering, and
• Operational ...