A European Commission FET Funded Co-ordinated Action Project Peter Baudains, UCL

Climate Change Energy Transport Health Terrorism Security Economy Education Taxation Crime Food Water Sustainable Urban Growth Immigration Olympics Poverty Challenges

Why are these systems so hard to model? Each is an open system interacting with many other open systems The systems exhibit multi-scale processes The systems are highly dynamic and often exhibit rapid change There are many complex networks There are often underlying nonlinear processes, including feedback

Mathematics to the rescue! Agent Based Modelling Network models Discrete models Coupled models Benchmarking Data Image from Finnigan, The Diabolical Problem, 2009

What other challenges are present? How do we gather our data? How reliable are our models? Can our models give immediate results? How do we communicate our findings to decision makers? How can decision makers interact with our models? How do we communicate and interact with the public?