Managing Complexity: Insights, Concepts, Applications PDF Download

Author: Dirk Helbing
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3540752617
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
The essays and lectures collected in this book center around knowledge transfer from the complex-system sciences to applications in business, industry and society, as viewed from a broad perspective. The contributions aim to raise awareness across the spectrum to meet the increasing need to integrate lessons from complexity research into everyday planning, decision making, logistics or optimization procedures and forecasting. The writing has been largely kept non-technical.

Author: G. Rzevski
Publisher: WIT Press
ISBN: 1845649362
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Managing Complexity is the first book that clearly defines the concept of Complexity, explains how Complexity can be measured and tuned, and describes the seven key features of Complex Systems: ConnectivityAutonomyEmergencyNonequilibriumNon-linearitySelf-organisationCo-evolution The thesis of the 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 extensive examples, including adaptive, real-time scheduling of taxis, see-going tankers, road transport, supply chains, railway trains, production processes and swarms of small space satellites. Additional case studies include adaptive servicing of the International Space Station; adaptive processing of design changes of large structures such as wings of the largest airliner in the world; dynamic data mining, knowledge discovery and distributed semantic processing. Finally, the book provides a foretaste of the next generation of complex issues, notably, The Internet of Things, Smart Cities, Digital Enterprises and Smart Logistics.

Author: Dr Chris Mowles
Publisher: Gower Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409486745
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
What do business school graduates learn, and how helpful is it for managing in the everyday, messy reality of organisations? What does it mean to apply 'best practice', or to take up 'evidence-based management' and what kind of thinking does this imply? In Rethinking Management, Chris Mowles argues that many management courses still largely assume a linear and predictable world, when experience tells us that the opposite is the case. He questions some of the more orthodox conceptual assumptions that underpin much management education and instead, encourages leaders and managers to take their everyday experience of working with others seriously. People in organisations co-operate and compete to get things done, and constrain and enable each other in relationships of power. Because of this there are always unintended consequences of our actions - uncertainty is inherent in the everyday. Chris Mowles draws on the complexity sciences, the sciences of uncertainty rather than certainty, and the social sciences to explore more helpful ways to think and talk about our lived reality. He takes concrete examples from contemporary organisations, to argue that understanding the radical implications of uncertainty is central to the task of leading. Rethinking Management explores narrative alternatives to the ubiquitous grids and frameworks that are routinely taught in business schools, and encourages management professionals and educators to recognise the importance of judgement, improvisation and the everyday politics of organisational life.

Author: Dirk Helbing
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3642240046
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
What are the principles that keep our society together? This question is even more difficult to answer than the long-standing question, what are the forces that keep our world together. However, the social challenges of humanity in the 21st century ranging from the financial crises to the impacts of globalization, require us to make fast progress in our understanding of how society works, and how our future can be managed in a resilient and sustainable way. This book can present only a few very first steps towards this ambitious goal. However, based on simple models of social interactions, one can already gain some surprising insights into the social, ``macro-level'' outcomes and dynamics that is implied by individual, ``micro-level'' interactions. Depending on the nature of these interactions, they may imply the spontaneous formation of social conventions or the birth of social cooperation, but also their sudden breakdown. This can end in deadly crowd disasters or tragedies of the commons (such as financial crises or environmental destruction). Furthermore, we demonstrate that classical modeling approaches (such as representative agent models) do not provide a sufficient understanding of the self-organization in social systems resulting from individual interactions. The consideration of randomness, spatial or network interdependencies, and nonlinear feedback effects turns out to be crucial to get fundamental insights into how social patterns and dynamics emerge. Given the explanation of sometimes counter-intuitive phenomena resulting from these features and their combination, our evolutionary modeling approach appears to be powerful and insightful. The chapters of this book range from a discussion of the modeling strategy for socio-economic systems over experimental issues up the right way of doing agent-based modeling. We furthermore discuss applications ranging from pedestrian and crowd dynamics over opinion formation, coordination, and cooperation up to conflict, and also address the response to information, issues of systemic risks in society and economics, and new approaches to manage complexity in socio-economic systems. Selected parts of this book had been previously published in peer reviewed journals.

Author: Roland W. Scholz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521183332
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 657

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Book Description
A comprehensive review and analysis of environmental literacy within the context of environmental science and sustainable development. Approaching the topic from multiple perspectives, the book explores the development of human understanding of the environment and human-environment interactions in the fields of biology, psychology, sociology, economics and industrial ecology.

Author: J.P. Singh
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317210735
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
This volume brings together 19 original chapters, plus four substantive introductions, which collectively provide a unique examination of the issues of science, technology, and art in international relations. The overarching theme of the book links global politics with human interventions in the world: We cannot disconnect how humans act on the world through science, technology, and artistic endeavors from the engagements and practices that together constitute IR. There is science, technology, and even artistry in the conduct of war—and in the conduct of peace as well. Scholars and students of international relations are beginning to explore these connections, and the authors of the chapters in this volume from around the world are at the forefront.

Author: Igor Douven
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262369915
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 371

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Book Description
A novel defense of abduction, one of the main forms of nondeductive reasoning. With this book, Igor Douven offers the first comprehensive defense of abduction, a form of nondeductive reasoning. Abductive reasoning, which is guided by explanatory considerations, has been under normative pressure since the advent of Bayesian approaches to rationality. Douven argues that, although it deviates from Bayesian tenets, abduction is nonetheless rational. Drawing on scientific results, in particular those from reasoning research, and using computer simulations, Douven addresses the main critiques of abduction. He shows that versions of abduction can perform better than the currently popular Bayesian approaches—and can even do the sort of heavy lifting that philosophers have hoped it would do. Douven examines abduction in detail, comparing it to other modes of inference, explaining its historical roots, discussing various definitions of abduction given in the philosophical literature, and addressing the problem of underdetermination. He looks at reasoning research that investigates how judgments of explanation quality affect people’s beliefs and especially their changes of belief. He considers the two main objections to abduction, the dynamic Dutch book argument, and the inaccuracy-minimization argument, and then gives abduction a positive grounding, using agent-based models to show the superiority of abduction in some contexts. Finally, he puts abduction to work in a well-known underdetermination argument, the argument for skepticism regarding the external world.

Author: Elizabeth McMillan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134379862
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Available in paperback for the first time, this book describes and considers ideas and insights from complexity science, and examines their use in organizations, especially in bringing about major organizational change.

Author: Hassan Qudrat-Ullah
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031406354
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 479

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Book Description
This book is about improving human decision making and performance in complex tasks. Utilizing systems thinking approach, this book presents innovative and insightful solutions to various managerial issues in various domains including agriculture, education, climate change, digital transformation, health care, supply chains, and sustainability. Practical insights and operational causal models are systematically presented. The key features of the didactic approach of this book are core knowledge, numerous tables and figures throughout the text, system archetypes, and causal loop models. This book serves as a text for college and university courses on Systems Thinking for Management Decision Making in Complex Tasks. Researchers use the developed “causal models” to design and evaluate various decision-aiding technologies. It is used as a source of practical information for a broad community of decision-makers, researchers, and practitioners concerned with the issue of improving human performance in complex organizational tasks.

Author: Hakan Tozan
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 953512045X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
In today's rapidly changing business environment, strong influence of globalization and information technologies drives practitioners and researchers of modern supply chain management, who are interested in applying different contemporary management paradigms and approaches, to supply chain process. This book intends to provide a guide to researchers, graduate students and practitioners by incorporating every aspect of management paradigms into overall supply chain functions such as procurement, warehousing, manufacturing, transportation and disposal. More specifically, this book aims to present recent approaches and ideas including experiences and applications in the field of supply chains, which may give a reference point and useful information for new research and to those allied, affiliated with and peripheral to the field of supply chains and its management.