Post-mortem analysis of emergent behavior in complex simulation models

Abstract

Analyzing and validating emergent behavior in component-based models is increasingly challenging as models grow in size and complexity. Despite increasing research interest, there is a lack of automated, formalized approaches to identify emergent behavior and its causes. As part of our integrated framework for understanding emergent behavior, we propose a post-mortem emergence analysis approach that identifies the causes of emergent behavior in terms of properties of the composed model and properties of the individual model components, and their interactions. In this paper, we detail the use of reconstructability analysis for post-mortem analysis of known emergent behavior. The two-step process first identifies model components that are most likely to have caused emergent behavior, and then analyzes their interaction. Our case study using small and large examples demonstrates the applicability of our approach.