Complex systems science - the essential 21st Century science

The new science of complex systems will be at the heart of the future of the Worldwide Knowledge Society. It is providing radical new ways of understanding the physical, biological, ecological, and social universe. Complex Systems are ambiguously situated in turbulent, unstable, and changing environments. They evolve and adapt through internal and external dynamic interactions. They are value-laden multi-level multi-component systems of systems and they are not predictable in a conventional scientific sense. Science is the process of reconstructing theory from data. But complex systems must be observed in vivo, requiring new multilevel data collection protocols, and new formalisms to reconstruct intra-level and inter-level dynamics, and their capacity to adapt to changing environments. Complex systems science bridges the gap between the individual and the collective: from genes to organisms to ecosystems, from atoms to materials to products, from notebooks to the Internet, from citizens to society. It cuts across all the disciplines. It is part of every discipline. It creates new and shorter paths between scientists and accelerates the flow of scientific knowledge. It reduces the gap between pure and applied science, establishing new foundations for the design, control and management of systems with unprecedented levels of complexity exceed the capacity of current approaches. It will benefit industry, the public sector, and all social actors. Complex systems science will be the foundation of Europes wealth and influence in the 21st century. The potential impact of this new Complex Systems Science appears in four ways (i) a better understanding of many complex systems and their dynamics to support the pressing needs to engineer and manage complex systems, e.g. cancer, multinational companies, drugs, transport, and climate change; (ii) better control of the means of fabrication as dynamic complex socio-technical systems, e.g. new processes and materials, multi-site factory production, and supply chain dynamics, (iii) a better understanding of the complex environment in which engineered systems exist, e.g. regulation, ethics, markets; and (iv) a better understanding of the design, engineering and management process which is often itself a creative complex multilevel complex human system, capable of great successes but inherently liable to spectacular failures. Complex systems science is computer enabled and ICT will be part of all the research programmes of FP7. For example, in Health the new science of complex systems will revolutionise the medical treatment of diseases, and revolutionise the delivery of treatment. Individual problems of individual people will be treated. This requires (i) huge distributed databases of every individuals genotype, phenotype, medical and general history, (ii) new ways of searching, communicating and processing this information, and (iii) new and more efficient ways organising the delivery of treatment to Europes half billion inhabitants. Thus, this crucial ICT-based complex systems programme requires a new family of European platforms, similar to the big instruments used for physics (e.g. CERN) to support the new theories and methods of control and design, many of which have yet to be invented. Europe also has an urgent need to increase its human resources in complex systems research, which in turn requires an urgent and radical programme of education at the doctoral and masters levels. In FP7, the creation of an Open University of Complex Systems is a priority. Last but not least, there is also an urgent need to bridge the gap between Complex Syistems Science and its applications in industry and the public sector.
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IST-FET Coordination Action Open Network of Centres of Excellence in Complex Systems; Project FP6IST 29814 [2006]