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Preface
Author(s) -
Krassimir Georgiev,
Michail Todorov,
Ivan Georgiev
Publication year - 1989
Publication title -
acta ophthalmologica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.534
H-Index - 87
eISSN - 1755-3768
pISSN - 1755-375X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1755-3768.1989.tb07079.x
Subject(s) - citation , computer science , information retrieval , library science , operations research , mathematics
This book addresses recent technological progress that has led to an increased complexity in societal, ecological, and engineered systems. This complexity is characterized by the emergence of new proprieties and structures resulting from nonlinear interactions among system elements and between system and its environment. This volume provides researchers and managers with qualitative and quantitative methods, bottom-up and holistic approaches for handling many features of the complex contemporary reality. This book is composed of three parts with a total of 13 chapters: Part I (Chaps. 1–6) focuses on societal and ecological systems, Part II (Chaps. 7–12) deals with approaches for understanding, modeling, forecasting, and mastering complex systems, and Part III (Chap. 13) includes reallife examples. Each chapter of this book has its own special features; it is a self-contained contribution of researchers working in different fields of science and technology relevant to the study of complex systems including Agent-Based Modeling, General Systems Theory, and Mathematical Modeling. In the chapter “ProtestLab: A Computational Laboratory for Studying Street Protests,” Lemos, Coelho, and Lopes present an Agent-Based model for the simulation of street protests, with multiple types of agents (protesters, police, and “media”) and scenario features (attraction points, obstacles, and entrances/exits). In this model agents can have multiple “personalities,” goals, and possible states. The model includes quantitative measures of emergent crowd patterns, protest intensity, police effectiveness, and potential “news impact,” which can be used to compare simulation outputs with estimates from videos of real protests for parameterization and validation. ProtestLab was applied to a scenario of policemen defending a government building from protesters and reproduced many features observed in real events, such as clustering of “active” and “violent” protesters, formation of moving confrontation lines, occasional fights and arrests, “media” agents wiggling around “hot spots,” and policemen with defensive or offensive behavior. In the chapter “A Generic Agent Based Model of Historical Social Behavior Change,” Ahmed M’hamdi et al. describe and discuss how human societies change over time. The main objective of this work is to build a generic agent-based model