Advances in Complex Intelligent Systems

Recent societal and technological advances allow developing systems composed of large and heterogeneous entities that interact collectively in complex and unpredictable manner. This increase in complexity is characterized by apparently new properties and complex behaviors that emerge as a result of often nonlinear spatiotemporal interactions among a large number of system components at different levels of organization and between system and its environment.1 Recently, there has been a growing interest for developing mechanisms and methods that allow system entities to collaborate in an intelligent manner. Computational intelligence and agent-based modeling represent novel approaches and promising tools to design and model intelligent systems to solve complex real-world problems. One of the most challenging issues is to handle real-world uncertainties that cannot be eliminated.2 These uncertainties include various types of information that are incomplete and imprecise.2 The uncertainties result in a lack of full and precise knowledge of the whole system.2 Computational intelligent techniques, which are complimentary to the existing traditional techniques, have also shown a great potential to solve these real-world decision problems that evolve in uncertain and dynamic environments. The articles for this special issue were selected from the papers presented at to the Second World Conference on Complex Systems (WCCS), which took place on November 10–12, 2014 in Agadir, Morocco. WCCS technically sponsored by IEEE and “International Academy for Systems and Cybernetic Science” attracted over 163 researchers from 20 countries around the world. From 351 submissions, 130 were selected as full papers and 33 as posters. The authors of the eight papers, which had been considered the best by the WCCS program committee, were invited to submit extended versions of their papers. Each of these was reviewed and assessed on the overall quality of the submitted work compared to the original WCCS paper. As a result, five articles were selected for inclusion in this special issue and provide a comprehensive overview of the key topic related to “computational intelligence and applications,” and “multi-agent systems” fields. Lemos et al. in the first article “On legitimacy feedback mechanisms in agentbased modeling of civil violence” extended Epstein’s well-known agent-based model of civil violence by introducing endogenous legitimacy feedback, with four different functions for expressing the legitimacy and two feedback mechanisms: