ThesisAuthors: Cheng, Shih-Fen (2006)
A complex system is an artificial system that cannot be modeled analytically or optimized in an effective manner, usually because it possesses the following properties: (1) the system can only be modeled as a simulation, (2) the size of the problem is untenable, so that even if the system could be modeled analytically, it would be impractical to solve it exactly, (3) necessary information required for problem solving is distributed in nature. This thesis presents methods for modeling and optimizing systems with the above challenging properties.
We first discuss the important modeling decision of whether to include stochasticity. By employing a real-world case study, we show that a standard numerical procedure can indeed help us make this decision. Next, we use the challenging probl... 
