Advances in Complex Societal, Environmental and Engineered Systems

We present an Agent-Based model called ProtestLab 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 ProtestLab agents can have multiple “personalities” (implemented via agent subtypes), goals and possible states, including violent confrontation. 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 parametrization and validation. ProtestLab was applied to a scenario of policemen defending a government building from protesters (typical of anti-austerity protests in front of the Parliament in Lisbon, Portugal) 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 behaviour.

The primary theme of this chapter is trying to describe, discuss and understand how human societies change over time using agent-based modeling. Agents become a major paradigm of social simulation allow us to model the complex social phenomena under the bottom-up approach. Certainly one of the key points of the bottom-up approach is the emergence of macro level phenomena from micro level actions and interactions. The main objective of this work is to build a Virtual Social Laboratory, from Rafael Pla Lopez Social evolution model, in order to explore the social evolution of a set of artificial societies/agents that evolve within a grid of cells which are characterized by a level of natural resources (artificial environment). This laboratory can help to explore and understand the East–West duality, the North–South Divide, the Human migration process, the globalization-polarization and some possible human social evolution.

Social complexity seems to be the number one critical success factor not only for project management or organisational development but for any attempt to govern the Anthropocene and bring about successful systemic change to meet climate change, poverty and political conflict to name but a few.

Social systems research seems to be unnecessarily underrated since it developed into a discipline which has more to offer than metaphors of swarm intelligence and self-organisation. On the contrary, constructivism facilitated the epistemological turn shifting from objectivity to functional adequacy as the central research criterion, and the digital transformation as well as gamification paved the path for a convincing new generation of systems analytics enlightening the political and cultural aspects of social complexity in an amazing fashion.

Systemic inquiry based on a praxeological understanding of action research opens new possibilities for social design impact evaluation and social innovation assessment. The next society needs to be systems savvy. Social systems research already shows how the next society could successfully meet its own social complexity.

Global development must become more sustainable. To do so, society must adopt a sustainable energy alternative to fossil fuels (Dincer 2000). Second-generation bioenergy from woody biomass (trees and other woody plants) offers a promising alternative that can avoid both the inevitable finite supply problems and climate change impacts of conventional energy (Hoogwijk et al. 2003). However, the sustainability of second-generation bioenergy depends greatly on the availability of a reliable woody biomass supply (Becker et al. 2009). The provisioning of biomass feedstock requires significant land-use land-cover change in the form of forest harvesting activity that greatly impacts local forest ecology, the viability of bioenergy markets, and other socially valued forest uses. These overlapping and often competing interests make estimating the availability of biomass and assessing its sustainability impacts a highly complex task (Berndes et al. 2003). The current chapter provides a framework for using Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) to assess the sustainability of bioenergy production in a way that accounts for this inherent complexity.

The resilience of ecologically significant landscapes is often hindered by traditional approaches to natural resource management, which treat ecologic, hydrologic, and social systems as distinct entities. Although acknowledging interdependencies is a great first step in managing complex systems, challenges exist in predicting effects of intervention due to key features such as non-linearity and uncertainty. In order to project the impact of urban populations on riparian corridors in a semi-arid desert, we integrated several modeling approaches to simulate how policy decision-making will effect riparian vegetation along the Upper San Pedro River. Policy decision-making was characterized with a Bayesian Belief Network, allowing uncertainty in the decision-making process to be incorporated. Policy decisions ultimately effected population growth and water use. Urban water demand, calculated by multiplying urban population size with per capita water consumption, was used in conjunction with response functions, developed from MODFLOW, to simulate changes in depth-to-groundwater by well pumping in a spatially-explicit agent-based model. Depth-to-groundwater was then used as an indicator of unique vegetation guilds within the riparian corridor. The model was used to test the effects of policy decision-making on the spatial distribution of riparian vegetation along the Upper San Pedro River. By using the model as a tool, decision-makers may have the ability to make better-informed decisions to ensure the resilience of the Upper San Pedro Watershed.

Complexity includes attributes of entanglement that result from relations and processes. It can be found in nature, society, organizations and technology. Humans specialize in their education, knowledge and experience. This makes specialists one-sided and thus hardly able to handle the given complexity, unless one applies one or more of the versions of systems theory, which support interdisciplinary creative cooperation, such as the Dialectical Systems Theory. The related applied methodologies and methods are also very useful, because they can be used without too much complexity of theories.

The complexity problem of nonlinear dynamic systems appears in a great number of scientific and engineering fields. The multi-model, also known as polytopic approach, constitutes an interesting tool for modeling dynamic nonlinear systems, in the framework of stability analysis and controller/observer design. A systematic procedure to transform a nonlinear system into a polytopic one will be briefly presented and illustrated by an academical example. This procedure gives the possibility of choosing between different polytopic structures, which is a degree of freedom used to ease the controllability, observability, stability analysis studies. In addition to that, the system transformation into polytopic form does not cause any information loss, contrarily to most existing studies in the field. In the second part of this chapter, a discussion about multiple time scale nonlinear systems, also known as singularly perturbed systems is proposed, by eliminating some structural constraints and by performing the identification and the separation of the time-scales. Robust observer synthesis with respect to internal/external perturbations, modeling parametrization errors and unknown inputs are presented for the estimation of different variables of interest, the state variables. The above-mentioned points will be applied to an activated sludge wastewater treatment plant (WWTP), which is a complex chemical and biological process. The variations in wastewater flow rate/composition and the time-varying bio-chemical reactions make this process nonlinear. Despite the process nonlinearity and complexity, there is a need to control the quality of the water rejected in the nature by the WWTPs in order to achieve the requirements of the European Union in terms of environmental protection. To this end, a Benchmark, proposed by the European program COST 624 to asses the control strategies of WWTPs, is used as an example in the present chapter.

A number of elements towards a classification of the quality of emergence in emergent collective systems are provided. By using those elements, several classes of emergent systems are exemplified, ranging from simple aggregations of simple parts up to complex organizations of complex collective systems. In so doing, the factors likely to play a significant role in the persistence of emergence and its opposite are highlighted. From this, new elements for discussion are identified also considering elements from the philosophy of Leibniz.

With the growing number of developing large-scale cities, traffic congestion has becomes a global issue. Traffic congestion could be attributed to topological structure of street network and traffic flow concentration. It is necessary to investigate these two factors simultaneously to solve traffic congestion. Therefore, this study proposed an innovative analytical procedure of ranking algorithm, the Flow-based PageRank (FBPR), for investigating the traffic flow concentration, complexity of street network structure and traffic impact areas. By overlapping these factors, street segments prone to traffic congestion are identified. A network modularity algorithm is used for delineating the traffic impact areas that will be affected by traffic congestion. Our results indicate that only relying on the topological structure of the street network, this framework could identify the Central Business Districts (CBD), and the areas proximate to the stations of the combination of MRT and train railway systems are prone to traffic congestion. Meanwhile, the delineation of traffic impact areas could be spatially targeted at priorities of traffic improvement for city planners.

On the fast actual demographic trend and increasing comfort level, consumers are becoming more and more demanding in the areas of heating, cooling, ventilation, air conditioning, and lighting. Reducing energy consumption is necessary in all key sectors, such as buildings and construction, cities, and urban areas. Recent studies showed that using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) will have a significant impact on improving energy efficiency and occupant comfort in complex real buildings. The main aim is to develop energy efficient control approaches and solutions to improve energy efficiency and occupant comfort by using innovative ICT techniques. These solutions could integrate techniques from different domains mainly intelligent control approaches using context-awareness and predictive analytics with a strong focus on occupant expectation, profile, and behavior. In this chapter, we put more emphasis on the influence of occupants’ activities, complex building’s systems on energy saving by reviewing existing approaches and tools for energy efficiency in complex real buildings.

We proposed a set of principles (Tables 1, 2, 3) based on the observation that all life forms are sustained by hierarchical juxtaposed and embedded networks (Fig. 1): ecoexotope and endophysiotope, with invariant properties: gauge invariance of Life (Fig. 2). Life is the most complex physical based phenomenon in the Universe, with a diversity of forms and functions over 62 orders of magnitude, from the Planck quantum level up to the whole Universe, and more…, that obeys the ARMSADA paradigm (La Violence. Colloque AFSCET, Andé, 7 p., 2000b; Vers une nouvelle systémique, Colloque AFSCET, Andé, 34 pp., 2010b). Many of the most fundamental phenomena scale with size according to power-laws (Paper presented at the international Colloque 150 ans après Darwin, 70 ans après Teilhard: Lire l'évolution, Paris, 109 pp., 2009a). In a surprisingly simple fashion, times (measured by the adult age of first reproduction: the time of generation tg) and sizes (measured by the volume at the growth phase ending: the adult 3D dimension VA) scale with a power-law of exponent 3/2 (Fig. 7). The universality and simplicity of this fractal relation (Fig. 8) suggests that a fundamental universal principle of exchange of matter and energy, the Brownian motion (Fig. 9), underlies the organization of all living systems (Fig. 6): the Life’s periodic Table of organization (Thermodynamique du changement, Colloque AFSCET, Andé, 63 pp., 2013a, Keynote World Conference on Complex Systems, Agadir, Morocco, 16 pp., 2014e, Revista Internacional de Sistemas 19:05–33, 2014f)!