All Hazards Analysis: A Complexity Perspective

Abstract

With the increase in the complexity of terrorism’s networks and activities, the advances in chemical and biological warfare, and the use of organized criminal activities, it is becoming apparent that dealing with this complexity is not possible with traditional problem-solving approaches. The artificial complexity area (Artificial Life, or ALife), complex systems and agent-based distillation (ABD) provide a new perspective to the problem and emphasize the importance of modeling the interaction between system components to tackle these issues. This chapter presents an introduction to Cellular Automota and ABD, and then reviews and critiques how these approaches specifically have been used to model aspects of bushfires, epidemics, biological warfare and terrorism. This chapter then extends upon previous works to present an overview of the possible use of artificial complexity models to the larger field of security and safety applications.