Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

Quantitative Characterization Of Complex Systems—An Information Theoretic Approach, Aditya Akundi, Eric Smith

Manufacturing & Industrial Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

A significant increase in System-of-Systems (SoS) is currently observed in the social and technical domains. As a result of the increasing number of constituent system components, Systems of Systems are becoming larger and more complex. Recent research efforts have highlighted the importance of identifying innovative statistical and theoretical approaches for analyzing complex systems to better understand how they work. This paper portrays the use of an agnostic twostage examination structure for complex systems aimed towards developing an information theorybased approach to analyze complex technical and socio-technical systems. Towards the goal of characterizing system complexity with information entropy, work was carried …

Entropy Applications In Industrial Engineering, Saeed Zamiri Marvizadeh

Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Entropy is a fundamental measure of information content which has been applied in a wide variety of fields. We present three applications of entropy in the industrial engineering field: dispatching of Automatic Guided Vehicles (AGV), ranking and selection of simulated systems based on the mean performance measure, and comparison between random variables based on cumulative probability distributions.

The first application proposes three entropy-based AGV dispatching algorithms. We contribute to the body of knowledge by considering the consequence of potential AGV moves on the load balance of the factory before AGVs are dispatched. Kullback-Leibler directed divergence is applied to measure the …

A Theory Of Emergence And Entropy In Systems Of Systems, John J. Johnson Iv, Andreas Tolk, Andres Sousa-Poza

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Systems of Systems (SOS) meet vital needs in our society by providing capabilities that are not possible by their discrete components or subsystems. Some SOS are engineered to produce predictable results, yet they can still display emergent behavior. These behaviors are often considered negative because they are not a function of the design. However, emergent behavior can also be serendipitous and produce unexpected positive results. The authors formalize a theory of emergence based on entropy. The theory has explanatory value for emergence as an ontological and phenomenological concept in systems of systems. © 2013 The Authors.

Order And Disorder, Entropy In Math, Science, Nature And The Arts, Sol Neeman Ph.D., Arie Maharshak

Engineering Studies Faculty Publications and Creative Works

Often, science and engineering students have difficult time in viewing certain concepts in their holistic form. An example for such a concept is the concept of Entropy. Although it originated from the field of thermodynamics, the relation between order and disorder is a profound one and manifests itself in various fields, sometimes unrelated, such as math and science, nature and the arts. In the discipline of physics, the amount of disorder in a system has been quantified by the concept of Entropy. In the area of information theory it provides a quantitative measure of the amount of compression that may …