In celebration of the 25th anniversary of the journal Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), Frank Schweitzer’s new book gives an overview of some of the most relevant developments in complex systems science over the past two decades.

It would not have been possible for complexity science to succeed over the past 25 years without pioneering institutions such as the ACS, claim CSH president Stefan Thurner and University of Chicago professor Luis Bettencourt in the book’s preface. “These pioneering venues provided the fora for communication, coordination, selection of ideas and cooperation between scientists. ACS, as one of the traditionally relevant journals in the field, covered the history and the remarkable transformation of complexity science over time. This is also reflected in the present book,” point out Thurner and Bettencourt.

The book, divided in four chapters, covers four different modelling approaches in detail: agent-based models; networks; system dynamics; and evolutionary dynamics. In each chapter, Schweitzer, a CSH external faculty member and professor at ETH Zurich, summarizes the essential concepts and discusses the main research directions and applications in various fields. Additionally, each chapter presents reprinted publications relevant to modeling complex systems from different disciplines.