250-TECHNICAL ARTICLE Simulation-Based Engineering Of Complex Adaptive Systems

Systems to be developed in the future will likely be more complex than in the past. The number of be-haviors a system can exhibit is one measure of sys-tem complexity. A complex system can be described as a large network of communicating subsystems. A regional or national Intelligent Transportation System exemplifies such a system. If each subsystem in the network adapts its behavior to collaborate with other subsystems to achieve overall goals, such a system is called a Complex Adaptive System (CAS). In this paper a building elevator system provides an example CAS in which each elevator collaborates with others to optimize system performance. A Context-Sensitive System model that explicitly deals with the complexity of CAS is dicussed. A graphi-cal simulation language, Operational Evaluation Modeling for Context-Sensitive Systems (OpEMCSS), assists in understanding CAS and automates most complex simulation details and semantics. OpEMCSS is distinctive from most simulation languages that have a graphical user interface in its ability to du-plicate processes without having to show every in-stance onscreen. OpEMCSS and its use in simula-tion-based systems engineering of CAS are discussed