Detecting Emergent Behaviors with Semi-Boolean Algebra

As aerospace and military systems become increasingly interconnected, their combined behavior can become more complex than each individual subsystem in isolation and unexpected self-organizing or emergent behaviors can result. Explicit consideration of emergent behavior has not been addressed in current systems development methodologies. This paper gives background on approaches for modeling emergent behavior and discusses the use of semi-Boolean algebra as a means for detecting emergence in combined behaviors. Semi-Boolean algebra is a generalization of the Boolean algebra by weakening the requirement that any two elements have a common upper bound. The paper also shares an example approach for modeling emergent behavior and describes several ways to detect emergent behavior with this technique.