Complex Systems Patterns
Project
Every field
has insider knowledge. The wisdom of experience is rarely found in the
published literature or standard texts. In computational modelling, there is an
art to designing and implementing effective and efficient simulations. Software
is often made available, but the insights that went into designing it stay with
the modeller. Complex systems modelling has its own wisdom – good ways to
design, and traps to beware – often designed to explore relationships between
mechanisms and behaviour at multiple temporal and spatial scales.
Fields such
as software engineering and architecture have benefited from the development of
abstract solutions to recurring problems, called patterns. "Patterns"
are a formalism first developed 40 years ago in the field of architecture to
capture the wisdom of architectural design, and have since been adopted by many
other fields, most recently by software engineering to facilitate reuse of
software frameworks, algorithms and code. Patterns are typically proposed in a
prototype form, then workshopped by experienced users.
The Complex
Systems Patterns Project is a long term project with the overall goal of
capturing the wisdom of the complex systems modelling community. Its activities
involve documenting patterns, and organising workshops for proposing and
refining patterns, and provide a repository for collating patterns useful to
complex systems modellers.
This
project has been run since January 2005 by Janet Wiles, James Watson, David Carrington and Jim Hanan,
and is supported by:
