Gregory Provan
University College Cork

A System-of-Systems approach to Formalising Complex Systems

Abstract:

A complex network-centric system, or system-of-systems (SoS), can be defined as a collection of interacting, 
autonomous or semi-autonomous sub-systems that together must interact to accomplish a task. This representation 
describes many important systems, including air traffic control, electric power grids, the internet, intelligent 
transportation systems and biological systems. In many instances, e.g., transactions on the internet, these systems 
operate in a purely decentralized, asynchronous fashion; however, we focus on applications in which an SoS needs to 
optimize the performance of a particular task. One example of a task-oriented system is a power grid, where a collection 
of power companies wants to supply consumers in a particular region with power while maximizing profit. We develop a 
mathematical framework for representing such systems based on graph grammars and hierarchical constraints. We show 
how this framework can describe an SoS across multiple levels, ranging from the low-level dynamical models to the 
high-level decision-theoretic models.