Books in the Understanding Complex Systems series

Social simulation is the study of natural and artificial society-like structures through the use of computational tools. This handbook comprehensively covers methodology, mechanisms and simulation tools. It also provides an introduction and extensive glossary.

The overall aim of this book, an outcome of the European FP7 FET Open NESS project, is to contribute to the ongoing effort to put the quantitative social sciences on a proper footing for the 21st century. A key focus is economics, and its implications on policy making, where the still dominant traditional approach increasingly struggles to capture the economic realities we observe in the world today - with vested interests getting too often in the way of real advances.Insights into behavioral economics and modern computing techniques have made possible both the integration of larger information sets and the exploration of disequilibrium behavior. The domain-based chapters of this work illustrate how economic theory is the only branch of social sciences which still holds to its old paradigm of an equilibrium science - an assumption that has already been relaxed in all related fields of research in the light of recent advances in complex and dynamical systems theory and related data mining.The other chapters give various takes on policy and decision making in this context. Written in nontechnical style throughout, with a mix of tutorial and essay-like contributions, this book will benefit all researchers, scientists, professionals and practitioners interested in learning about the 'thinking in complexity' to understand how socio-economic systems really work.

This edited volume presents chapters on the dynamics of global climate change and global warming in the Middle East. The audience for this volume includes policy makers, researchers, and students unified by the common goal of making better decisions in the sustainable production and consumption of energy.

It provides a unified view of nonlinear properties in many different systems and highlights many new developments.While volume 1 concentrates on mathematical theory and computational techniques and challenges, which are essential for the study of nonlinear science, this second volume deals with nonlinear excitations in several fields.

Title is included in the Springer Complexity programme.

This book presents the latest tools, techniques, and solutions that decision makers use to overcome the challenges faced by their sustainable supply chains.

This book gives the definitive mathematical answer to what thermodynamics really is: a variational calculus applied to probability distributions. Extending Gibbs's notion of ensemble, the Author imagines the ensemble of all possible probability distributions and assigns probabilities to them by selection rules that are fairly general. The calculus of the most probable distribution in the ensemble produces the entire network of mathematical relationships we recognize as thermodynamics. The first part of the book develops the theory for discrete and continuous distributions while the second part applies this thermodynamic calculus to problems in population balance theory and shows how the emergence of a giant component in aggregation, and the shattering transition in fragmentation may be treated as formal phase transitions.While the book is intended as a research monograph, the material is self-contained and the style sufficiently tutorial to be accessible for self-paced study by an advanced graduate student in such fields as physics, chemistry, and engineering.

This book presents the latest tools, techniques, and solutions that decision makers use to overcome the challenges faced by their sustainable supply chains.

The analysis of recurrences in dynamical systems by using recurrence plots and their quantification is still an emerging field.

The present work is meant as a reference to provide an organic and comprehensive view of the most relevant results in the exciting new field of Networks of Networks (NetoNets). From those seminal works, the awareness on the importance understanding Networks of Networks (NetoNets) has spread to the entire community of Complexity Science.

This self-contained text develops a Markov chain approach that makes the rigorous analysis of a class of microscopic models that specify the dynamics of complex systems at the individual level possible.

In particular, a general model for studying time evolution of transition networks, deflection routing in complex networks, recommender systems for social networks analysis and mining, strategy selection in networked evolutionary games, integration and methods in computational biology, are discussed in detail.

Wherever quantitative modeling and analysis of complex, nonlinear phenomena is required, chaos theory and its methods can play a key role. his fourth volume concentrates on reviewing further relevant contemporary applications of chaotic and nonlinear dynamics as they apply to the various cuttingedge branches of science and engineering.

The aim of this book is to advocate and promote network models of linguistic systems that are both based on thorough mathematical models and substantiated in terms of linguistics.

A variety of new models and approaches are presented here, including Dynamic Network Analysis, DIME/PMESII models, percolation models and emergent models of insurgency.

This book provides the reader with both a comprehensive understanding of the phenomena encountered in decision making with human facilitated ILEs and a unique way of studying the effects of these phenomena on people's ability to make better decision in complex, dynamic tasks.

This monograph set presents a consistent and self-contained framework of stochastic dynamic systems with maximal possible completeness. This approach offers a possibility of both obtaining exact solutions to stochastic problems for a number of models of fluctuating parameters and constructing various asymptotic buildings.

The Second Law, a cornerstone of thermodynamics, governs the average direction of dissipative, non-equilibrium processes.

The present work investigates global politics and political implications of social science and management with the aid of the latest complexity and chaos theories. The authors provide the reader a detailed analysis on politics and its associated applications with the help of chaos theory, in a single edited volume.

This book offers an analytical framework based on activity theory, showing how systems thinking evolves and how it can support multidisciplinary teamwork in systems development and engineering. Explores WAVES (Work Activity for Evolution of Systems) strategy.

Gathering lectures by experts in nonlinear science, this book covers chaos gates, social networks, communication, sensors, lasers, molecular motors, biomedical anomalies, stochastic resonance, nano-oscillators for generating microwave signals and more.

In this book, the major ideas behind Organic Computing are delineated, together with a sparse sample of computational projects undertaken in this new field. Biological metaphors include evolution, neural networks, gene-regulatory networks, networks of brain modules, hormone system, insect swarms, and ant colonies.

This book discusses model building and evaluation across disciplines, by means of an exact path integral for transferring information from observations to a model of the observed system. Offers examples in geosciences, nonlinear electrical circuits and more.

This self-contained presentation by leading researchers provides a coherent introduction to the residual generator method of fault detection in non-linear systems, which meets the precision requirements of real-time diagnostics in complex industrial processes.

Rather than focusing on complexity as often discussed in physics or computer science, this book examines more 'human' or socially oriented perspectives on complexity, taking account of the language and communication singularities of human agents in society.

In this book, experts from biology, physics and the social sciences examine the unification of all design phenomena in nature and apply this knowledge to designs in engineering, such as vascularization for self-healing and self-cooling materials for aircraft.

This book, edited and authored by a closely collaborating network of social scientists and psychologists, recasts typical research topics in these fields into the language of nonlinear, dynamic and complex systems.

This book attempts to explain why and how humans behave much like atoms in some aspects of their collective lives. The authors then suggest ways that this knowledge could serve as the key to a dramatic leap forwards in social freedom in the real world.

In this book, the major ideas behind Organic Computing are delineated, together with a sparse sample of computational projects undertaken in this new field. Biological metaphors include evolution, neural networks, gene-regulatory networks, networks of brain modules, hormone system, insect swarms, and ant colonies.