Complex Engineered Systems -

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Résumé :
Recent advances in science and technology have led to a rapid increase in the complexity of most engineered systems. In many notable cases, this change has been a qualitative one rather than merely one of magnitude. A new class of Complex Engineered Systems (CES) has emerged as a result of technologies such as the Internet, GPS, wireless networking, micro-robotics, MEMS, fiber-optics and nanotechnology. These complex engineered systems are composed of many heterogeneous subsystems and are characterized by observable complex behaviors that emerge as a result of nonlinear spatio-temporal interactions among the subsystems at several levels of organization and abstraction. Examples of such systems include the World-Wide Web, air and ground traffic networks, distributed manufacturing environments, and globally distributed supply networks, as well as new paradigms such as self-organizing sensor networks, self-configuring robots, swarms of autonomous aircraft, smart materials and structures, and self-organizing computers. Understanding, designing, building and controlling such complex systems is going to be a central challenge for engineers in the coming decades.

Sommaire:
Complex Engineered Systems: A New Paradigm.- Engineering Complex Systems: Multiscale Analysis and Evolutionary Engineering.- The Structure and Dynamics of Complex Product Design.- On the Nature of Design.- Creation of desirable complexity: strategies for designing selforganized systems.- Understanding the Complexity of Design.- Spiraling out of Control: Problem-Solving Dynamics in Complex Distributed Engineering Projects.- The Dynamics of Collaborative Design: Insights From Complex Systems and Negotiation Research.- Modularity in the Design of Complex Engineering Systems.- Engineering Complex Systems.- Negotiation algorithms for collaborative design settings.- Information Theory ? The Bridge Connecting Bounded Rational Game Theory and Statistical Physics.- Engineering Amorphous Systems, Using Global-to-Local Compilation.- A Machine Learning Method for Improving Task Allocation in Distributed Multi-Robot Transportation.- Towards Pro-active Embodied Agents: On the Importance of Neural Mechanisms Suitable to Process Time Information.- Autonomous Discovery and Functional Response to Topology Change in Self-Reconfigurable Robots.