Concepts in complexity engineering

Complexity science has seen increasing interest in the recent years. Many engineers have discovered that traditional methods come to their limits when coping with complex adaptive systems or autonomous agents. To find alternatives, complexity science can be applied to engineering, resulting in a quickly growing field, referred to as complexity engineering. Most current efforts come either from scientists who are interested in bio-inspired methods and working in computer science or mobile robots, or they come from the area of systems engineering. This article reviews the definitions of the most important concepts such as emergence and self-organisation from an engineer’s perspective, and analyses different types of nature-inspired technology. This is the first part of a set of two-articles on this topic; the second one provides a survey of currently existing approaches to complexity engineering, identifies challenges and gives directions for further research.