Читать книгу Complex Decision-Making in Economy and Finance - Pierre Massotte - Страница 36

This case study was taken as a typical example of a situation that many people are familiar with: it is a Global Information System Network of which the Internet, or Intranet, is one of the elements. This heterogeneous network includes a large number of server and client centers. Each center or agent has its own strategies and can perform different routing or control tasks, as shown in Figure 1.3.

Knowledge and information are distributed throughout the network [MAI 94]. The evolution and growth of such a system with tens of thousands of nodes cannot be ensured, controlled or planned from a central computer. In such a network there is an “apparent” anarchism; each node (agent) is an autonomous computer system: it has the possibility to direct traffic according to predefined rules and the saturation state of the network. It can also manage information flows according to their nature and the state of nearby cells. Indeed, and as we have seen, even though some cells, or a group of cells, have chaotic behavior, there is often a smoothing of chaos at the global level.

Figure 1.3. A dynamic industrial system with nonlinear interactions

In this figure, we see that it is cellular automata (CA) with independent but interacting agents who do not have knowledge of the overall consequences of their actions. The probabilistic data and incomplete or inaccurate information they manipulate, combined with processing delays, result in the emergence of various attractive states such as fixed points, oscillations or even deterministic chaos and auto-catalytic mechanisms that converge them into particular collective states and behaviors. There is the emergence of a collective “intelligence” that cannot be predicted and controlled in advance and that highlights the fact that reductionist approaches cannot be referred to. For these industrial, dynamic and nonlinear interaction systems, the development of models based on evolution equations makes it possible to characterize and study them.