System of Systems Modeling and Analysis

6Agent-Based Modeling

When we discussed the role of modeling and analysis in engineering, we highlighted the difficulty of decision-making for complex systems (see Section 2.2). Modeling can be a challenging task for large-scale systems, even when they can be approached from first principles such as by using laws of physics for physical systems or by fitting a model to empirical data. When we have good understanding of a system's dynamics, we start with a priori knowledge of its behaviors and use the process of deduction by reasoning logically about the implications of our existing knowledge to arrive at the desired model. When this approach is not feasible, we can attempt to use induction to discover patterns within available data. However, ...