The research area of Complex Systems at LIACC strives to uncover fundamental principles and to develop new methods and tools to model, understand and manage the behaviour that emerges as a consequence of the interaction that occurs, asynchronously and at multiple points, between individual intelligent and heterogeneous components and between these and the environment.
The objective is to derive rules about how the behavior of the system depends on the combined properties of its individual elements, the nature of the interactions between the individual elements and the topology of the interactions between them, in order to understand, predict and be able to control the system.
This research area in LIACC is devoted to the coordination of the interoperability of these systems, and concrete tasks addressing problems requiring distributed, decentralized solutions in dynamic, cooperative or competitive environments. A special emphasis is being done to agent and multi-agent methodology in complex systems modeling. Another concern of the laboratory in this research area is the learning and control of complex dynamic systems, where conditions are constantly shifting and hard to predict.