The Perspectives on Developing a Conceptual Model for Exploring Emergent Behaviors in Complex Systems

In systems development, it is necessary to think thoroughly about any emergent behaviors that might occur and create strategies to prevent the undesirable emergent behavior from occurring or at least mitigate them. Often dealing with that at later development stages is costly. Emergent behaviors are the main concern, particularly in the development of complex systems. However, identifying and predicting them is challenging in complex systems as it involves lots of components and interactions. Prior to making wise design decisions, developers need to elucidate and understand the emergent behaviors. For this reason, a conceptual model that highlights the presence of emergent behavior at an early stage is essential in the systems development. The conceptual model is useful in achieving higher coverage as it is correlated with the probability of identifying more emergent behaviors. Therefore, this paper goes through the existing work focusing on effort in modeling emergent behavior and presents perspectives on developing a conceptual model that is able to inform the presence of emergent behavior.