E-Book Overview
Recent advances in science and technology have led to a rapid increasein the complexity of most engineered systems. In many notable cases,this change has been a qualitative one rather than merely one of magnitude.A new class of Complex Engineered Systems (CES) has emerged as a resultof technologies such as the Internet, GPS, wireless networking, micro-robotics, MEMS, fiber-optics and nanotechnology. These complex engineered systems are composed of many heterogeneous subsystems and are characterized by observable complex behaviors that emerge as a result of nonlinear spatio-temporal interactions among the subsystems at several levels of organization and abstraction. Examples of such systems include the World-Wide Web, air and ground traffic networks, distributed manufacturing environments, and globally distributed supply networks, as well as new paradigms such as self-organizing sensor networks, self-configuring robots, swarms of autonomous aircraft, smart materials and structures, and self-organizing computers. Understanding, designing, building and controlling such complex systems is going to be a central challenge for engineers in the coming decades.
E-Book Content
Springer Complexity Springer Complexity is a publication program, cutting across all traditional disciplines of sciences as well as engineering, economics, medicine, psychology and computer sciences, which is aimed at researchers, students and practitioners working in the field of complex systems. Complex Systems are systems that comprise many interacting parts with the ability to generate a new quality of macroscopic collective behavior through self-organization, e.g., the spontaneous formation of temporal, spatial or functional structures. This recognition, that the collective behavior of the whole system cannot be simply inferred from the understanding of the behavior of the individual components, has led to