Complex Adaptive Systems, Systems Thinking, and Agent-Based Modeling

Systems thinking and complex adaptive systems theories share a number of components, namely emergence, self-organization, and hierarchies of interacting systems. We seek to integrate these schools of thought and discuss the similarities and differences of these two models, to introduce systems dynamics and agent-based modeling as methods for modeling complex systems, and how causal-loop diagrams can be used as a means to clarify the complex interactions among components (agents). We then apply a mixture of these different but similar techniques to a fly ecosystem modeling problem to demonstrate their effectiveness.