Managing Complexity

This is the first book to describe large-scale complex adaptive systems and their application to practical business problems to yield excellent returns on investment. Various case studies are included ranging from real-time scheduling of 2,000 taxis in London and 10% of world capacity of seagoing tankers transporting crude oil around the globe, to adaptive cargo delivery to the International Space Station, semantic processing of scientific abstracts, dynamic patterns discovery from large quantity of data, real-time management of global supply chains and adaptive management of design modifications of large aircraft wings. The applications are backed up with a concise outline of the fundamental concepts, principles and methods of Complexity Science. An insight is provided into the connection between digital technology and the ever-increasing complexity of contemporary social and economic environments and a powerful method of managing complexity is described in some detail. The book contains an extensive description of the fundamentals of multi-agent technology, which has been developed by the authors and used in the design of complex adaptive software and complex adaptive business processes.