CoSMoS 2008: Complex Systems Modelling and Simulation

The study of Complex Systems is growing rapidly, and modelling and simulation tools are an important part of the process. This volume brings together work from a multidisciplinary group of scientists, from biology and computer science, who are studying a variety of techniques and applications for modelling and simulating complex systems. A common theme emerging from much of this work is an emphasis on validation: how one can have confidence that a computer simulation is saying something sensible about the complex real-world domain of interest.

The book includes papers from a range of contributors, from a range of backgrounds including computer science, clinical medicine, immunology, and plant biology.

Ognen Paunovski, George Eleftherakis, and Tony Cowling have a detailed description of their multi-agent simulation framework to investigate emergence. They include an interesting blend of formal modelling, simulation, and validation and verification steps. They apply their approach to a small case study of animal herding.

Robert Alexander, Ruth Alexander-Bown, and Tim Kelly explore some of the problems that arise when engineering safety critical complex systems, and in particular, how one might argue the validity of simulation data in a safety case analysis.

Philip Garnett, Susan Stepney, and Ottoline Leyser apply the CoSMoS project's modelling approach outside the project itself, for the purposes of building a detailed simulation of a complex biological system: auxin transport canalisation in plant stems. Here the focus is very much on the biological process itself, rather than on more generic systems concerns, yet generic principles can still be extracted.