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. Cover 1 Managing Complexity 4 Copyright Page 5 Contents 6 Introduction 12 Acknowledgement 14 Part 1: Fundamentals 16 1. What is complexity? 18 2. A method for managing complexity 38 3. Multi-agent technology 50 4. Emergent intelligence 78 Part 2: Commercial applications 88 5. Adaptive scheduling of seagoing tankers 90 6. Adaptive scheduling of taxis 94 7. Adaptive scheduling of car rentals 102 8. Adaptive scheduling of road transport 112 9. Adaptive data mining 122 10. Adaptive semantic processing 136 11. Adaptive detection of clashes caused by design changes 146 12. Adaptive scheduling of supply networks 150 13. Adaptive scheduling of services for the international space station 160 14. Adaptive scheduling of a fleet of satellites 166 15. Adaptive scheduling of high-speed railways 172 16. Adaptive scheduling of manufacturing 176 17. Adaptive management of service teams 182 18. Adaptive project management 186 Part 3: A roadmap into the future 192 19. A vision and ideas 194 The story of managing complexity 202 References 204 Authors 208 Index 212 A 212 B 212 C 212 D 212 E 212 G 212 I 212 K 212 L 212 M 212 N 212 O 212 P 213 R 213 S 213 T 213 U 213 V 213 T 213 "The thesis of this book is that complexity of the environment in which we work and live offers new opportunities and that the best strategy for surviving and prospering under conditions of complexity is to develop adaptability to perpetually changing conditions. An effective method for designing adaptability into business processes using multi-agent technology is presented and illustrated by several examples, including adaptive, real-time scheduling of taxis, seagoing tankers, supply chains, and production processes. Additional case studies include adaptive servicing of the International Space Station, dynamic data mining, and distributed semantic processing".--Quatrième de couverture