This book, the first in a series on this subject, is the outcome of many years of efforts to give a new all-encompassing approach to complex systems in nature based on chaos theory. While maintaining a high level of rigor, the authors avoid an overly complicated mathematical apparatus, making the book accessible to a wider interdisciplinary readership.

This book examines life not from the reductionist point of view, but rather asks the questions: what are the universal properties of living systems, and how can one construct from there a phenomenological theory of life that leads naturally to complex processes such as reproductive cellular systems, evolution and differentiation? The presentation is relatively non-technical to appeal to a broad spectrum of students and researchers.

Chaos in science has always been a fascinating realm since it challenges the usual scientific approach of reductionism. While carefully distinguishing between complexity, holism, randomness, incompleteness, nondeterminism and stochastic behaviour the authors show that, although many aspects of chaos have been phenomenologically understood, most of its defining principles are still difficult to grasp and formulate. Demonstrating that chaos escapes all traditional methods of description, the authors set out to find new methods to deal with this phenomenon and illustrate their constructive approach with many examples from physics, biology and information technology. While maintaining a high level of rigour, an overly complicated mathematical apparatus is avoided in order to make this book accessible, beyond the specialist level, to a wider interdisciplinary readership.

This book examines life not from the reductionist point of view, but rather asks the questions: what are the universal properties of living systems, and how can one construct from there a phenomenological theory of life that leads naturally to complex processes such as reproductive cellular systems, evolution and differentiation? The presentation is relatively non-technical to appeal to a broad spectrum of students and researchers.

This book provides a good coverage of the recent developments and future directions in the study of dissipative systems. The primary thrust here is in exposing the reader to the frontiers of chaos, pointing out clues for further work in nonlinear science. With the aid of various types of mappings, the collapse of tori is investigated. The book contains much valuable introductory material and copious reference lists. Some notes on the historical development of the subject are interspersed in this volume.

This review volume is devoted to a discussion of analogies and differences of complex production systems - natural, as in biological cells, or man-made, as in economic systems or industrial production. Taking this unified look at production is based on two observations: Cells and many biological networks are complex production units that have evolved to solve production problems in a reliable and optimal way in a highly stochastic environment. On the other hand, industrial production is becoming increasingly complex and often hard to predict. As a result, modeling and control of such production networks involve many different spatial and temporal scales and decision policies for many different structures. The common themes of industrial and biological production include evolution and optimization, synchronization and self-organization, robust operation despite high stochasticity, and hierarchical dynamics. The mathematical techniques used come from dynamical systems theory, transport equations, control theory, pattern formation, graph theory, discrete event simulations, stochastic processes, and others. The application areas range from semiconductor production to supply chains, protein networks, slime molds, social networks, and whole economies.