Futures, 1994

Complex systems are becoming the focus of important innovative research and application in many areas, reflecting the progressive displacement of classical physics and the emergence of a new and creative role for mathematics. This article makes a distinction between ordinary and emergent complexity and argues that a full analysis requires dialectical thinking. In so doing the authors aim to provide a philosophical foundation for post-normal science. The exploratory analysis developed here is complementary to those conducted with a more formal, mathematical approach, and begins to articulate what lies on the other side of that somewhat indistinct divide, the conceptual space called emergent complexity.

In different disciplines such as philosophy o f mind, dynamical systems theory, and connec tionism the term 'em ergence' has different jobs to perform. Therefore, various concepts of em ergence are developed and examined. While weaker versions are compatible with prop erty reductionism, stronger versions are not. Within philosophy of mind, particularly within the qualia debate there is a need for a strong notion of emergence, while in discussions of emergent properties of connectionist nets or of dynamical systems one can do with weaker notions of emergence. * This comm unication is a contribution to the workshop on "Natural Organisms, Artificial Organisms, and Their Brains" at the Zentrum für interdisziplinäre

2007

They mainly concentrate on the difficult balance to be established between the relative system isolation when becoming complex and the delegation of corresponding new capability from (outside) operator. This implies giving the system some "intelligence" in an adequate frame between the new augmented system state and supervising operator, with consequences on the canonical system triplet {effector-sensor-controller} which has to be reorganized in this new setting. Moreover, it is observed that entering complexity state opens the possibility for the function to feedback onto the structure, ie to mimic at technical level the invention of Nature over Her very long history.

2008

It inludes chapter on Graph Theory and Small-World Networks, Chaos, Bifurcations and Diffusion, Complexity and Information Theory, Random Boolean Networks, Cellular Automata and Self-Organized Criticality, Darwinian evolution, Hypercycles and Game Theory, Synchronization Phenomena and Elements of Cognitive System Theory.

2007

The aim in this satellite conference is to study emergent properties arising through dynamical processes in various types of natural and artificial systems. The session is concerned with multidisciplinary approaches for getting representations of complex systems and using different methods to extract emergent structures. Equations formulation can lead to the study of emergent features such as self organization, opening on stability and robustness properties. Invariant techniques can express global emergent properties in dynamical evolution systems. Artificial systems such as a distributed platform for simulation can be used to search emergent

1999

Abstract Basic ideas of the statistical topography of random processes and fields are presented, which are used in the analysis of coherent phenomena in simple dynamical systems. Such phenomena take place with probability one, and provide links between individual realizations and statistical characteristics of systems at large.

The paper is in two parts and in Part (1) attempts to formalise the loose concept of " System of Systems " (SoS) within the context of Systems Theory whilst in Part (2) explores and develops a conceptual framework for emergence that is suitable for further development. We view the notion of SoS as an evolution of the standard notion of systems and provide an abstract and generic definition that is detached from the particular domain. The notion of emergence is considered within both the framework of Composite and SoS and it is linked to the problem of defining functions on a given system and evaluating their values. The emergence is thus presented as the defining signature of a system including System of Systems. 1. Introduction In the last ten years a lot of interest has been given to the concept of " System of Systems " (SoS) which has emerged in many fields of applications. This new concept describes the integration of many independent, autonomous systems, frequently of large dimensions, which are brought together in order to satisfy a global goal and under certain rules of engagement as examined in Part 1 of this paper. Within this new challenging paradigm the notion of emergence is also frequently used in a rather loose way. The development of the of the overall area requires a structured definition of the SoS notion, as well as development of proper taxonomy for the notion of emergence as well as development of metrics that may provide suitable quantitative evaluation of the notion. In Part 2, we examine the philosophical dimension of the concept of emergence, and provide an abstract system based definition that aims to provide links with " metrics ". We give an abstract definition of emergence based on the system data that may be also linked to system modelling. The notion of a " system models " based on some driving goal is instrumental to the effort to define " emergent property metrics " ; the latter are crucial in transforming abstract concepts to instruments for design/re-engineering. Perhaps a philosophical overview of emergence is best initiated by reference to Plato's cosmology [22]. Unlike the Judao-christian counterpart, Plato's God created the world from pre-existing four elements of fire, air, water and earth in proportions to create stability and harmony, in his own image. Plato's God resembles the intelligent system architect who had knowledge of the perfect properties desired from the creation through proportioning the elements to cause emergent order and harmony out of chaos. The next significant contribution comes from Aristotle's metaphysics [23]. He advances the theory of universals which is the nature predicated of many subjects. In this spirit, a universal cannot exist by itself, but represents a particular class of things. The next significant concept is that of the essence, i.e. the properties that cannot be reduced or lost without the object ceasing to to exist. The essence can belong to an individual item or a class of the same items. The notions of matter and form follow in the system analogy that a physical item must be bounded and what lies at the boundary is the form. However, Aristotle's concept of form is not limited to the physical and resembles that of the essence since he considers the soul being the form for the body, giving it purpose and unity but remains inseparable from the body. The spatial shape is only one kind of form in this doctrine.

Emergence is a term used in many contexts in current science; it has become fashionable. It has a traditional usage in philosophy that started in 1875 and was expanded by J.S. Mill (earlier, under a different term) and C.D. Broad. It is this form of emergence that I will be concerned with here. I will distinguish it from uses like ‘computational emergence’, which can be reduced to combinations of program steps, or its application to merely surprising new features that appear in complex combinations of parts. I will be concerned specifically with ontological emergence that has the logical properties required by Mill and Broad (though there might be some quibbling about the details of their views). I restrict myself to dynamical systems that are embodied in processes. Everything that we can interact with through sensation or action is either dynamical or can be understood in dynamical terms, so this covers all comprehensible forms of emergence in the strong (nonreducible) sense I use. I will give general dynamical conditions that underlie the logical conditions traditionally assigned to emergence in nature. The advantage of this is that, though we cannot test logical conditions directly, we can test dynamical conditions. This gives us an empirical and realistic form of emergence, contrary those who say it is a matter of perspective.

Journal of Statistical Research of Iran, 2010

Using the concept of system signature introduced by Samaniego (1985), Kochar et al. (1999) compared the lifetimes of the systems in which the lifetimes of the components are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) random variables. Their results are extended to the systems with exchangeable components by Navarro et al. (2005). This paper gives some alternative proofs to obtain their results. Particularly in view of the hazard rate ordering, we compare two systems with different structures and components, which extends Theorem 8 in Navarro et al. (2005). We also compare two systems with different structures and components in view of the likelihood ratio ordering. Some illustrative examples are mentioned.