Understanding Complex Systems Through Computational Modeling and Simulation

Résumé du livre

Traditional approaches are not sufficient, and sometimes impossible in dealing with complexity issues such as emergence, self-organization, evolution and adaptation of complex systems. As illustrated in this thesis by the practical work of the author in a real-life project, the spreading of infectious disease as well as interventions could be considered as difusion processes on complex networks of heterogeneous individuals in a society which is considered as a reactive system. Modeling of this system requires explicitly specifying of each individual's behaviors and (re)actions, and transforming them into computational model which has to be flexible, reusable, and ease of coding. Statechart, typical for model-based programming, is a good solution that the thesis proposes. Bottom-up agent based simulation finds emergence episodes in what-if scenarios that change rules governing agent's behaviors that requires agents to learn to adapt with these changes. Decision tree learning is proposed to bring more flexibility and legibility in modeling of agent's autonomous decision making during simulation runtime. Our proposition for computational models such as agent based models are complementary to traditional ones, and in some case they are unique solutions due to legal, ethical issues.