Control of complex sociotechnical systems: Importance of causal models and game theory

摘要

Recent systemic failures in different domains have reminded us, once again, of the fragility of complex sociotechnical systems. Although the failures occurred in very different domains, there are, however, certain common underlying mechanisms driving these disasters. Understanding these mechanisms is essential to avoid such disasters in the future. To understand them, one needs to go beyond analyzing them as independent one-off accidents, and examine them in the broader perspective of the potential fragility of sociotechnical systems. It is their scale, nonlinearity, inter-connectedness, and interactions with humans and the environment that can make these systems fragile. Here we present an overview of the challenges and opportunities in the modeling and analysis of sociotechnical systems. We highlight a control-theoretic modeling framework that unifies the social and the technical components. We discuss how certain problems can be addressed by using concepts and techniques from causal modeling, game theory, and behavioral economics. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.