South-East European Research Centre (SEERC)

Emergence, as a major property of complex systems, appears in a variety of systems. However due to its intrinsic complexity and the fact that it only appears at runtime it is still a scientific unknown. Consequently in recent years multiagent simulation has been proposed as method to increase the scientific understanding of emergent phenomena. In this context a vital part of the exploration of emergence is the ability to detect and quantify a manifestation of the phenomenon in the system under study. As part of a larger study, aimed to explore the causal relations in herd formations, this presentation discusses the investigation of a developed mechanism for automated detection of herds. The proposed solution is based on fuzzy reasoning module which incorporates both bottom-up and topdown phases in order to reason about different aggregations of animals.