Complex Adaptive System Design (Part 2)

Yesterday Blake Pollard and I drove to Metron’s branch in San Diego. For the first time, I met four of the main project participants: John Foley (math), Thy Tran (programming), Tom Mifflin and Chris Boner (two higher-ups involved in the project). Jeff Monroe and Tiffany Change give us a briefing on Metron’s ExAMS software. This lets you design complex systems and view them in various ways.

The most fundamental view is the ‘activity trace’, which consists of a bunch of parallel rows, one for each ‘performer’. Each row has a bunch of boxes which represent ‘activities’ that the performer can do. Two boxes are connected by a wire when one box’s activity causes another to occur. In general, time goes from left to right. Thus, if B can only occur after A, the box for B is drawn to the right of the box for A.

The wires can also merge via logic gates. For example, suppose activity D occurs whenever A and B but not C have occurred. Then wires coming out of the A, B, and C boxes merge in a logic gate and go into the A box. However, these gates are a bit more general than your ordinary Boolean logic gates. They may also involve ‘delays’, e.g. we can say that A occurs 10 minutes after B occurs.

I would like to understand the mathematics of just these logic gates, for starters. Ignoring delays for a minute (get the pun?), they seem to be giving a generalization of Petri nets. In a Petri net we only get to use the logical connective ‘and’. In other words, an activity can occur when all of some other activities have occurred. People have considered various generalizations of Petri nets, and I think some of them allow more general logical connectives, but I’m forgetting where I saw this done. Do you know?

In the full-fledged activity traces, the ‘activity’ boxes also compute functions, whose values flow along the wires and serve as inputs to other box. That is, when an activity occurs, it produces an output, which depends on the inputs entering the box along input wires. The output then appears on the wires coming out of that box.

I forget if each activity box can have multiple inputs and multiple outputs, but that’s certainly a natural thing.

The fun part is that one one can zoom in on any activity trace, seeing more fine-grained descriptions of the activities. In this more fine-grained description each box turns into a number of boxes connected by wires. And perhaps each wire becomes a number of parallel wires? That would be mathematically natural.

Activity traces give the so-called ‘logical’ description of the complex system being described. There is also a much more complicated ‘physical’ description, saying the exact mechanical functioning of all the parts. These parts are described using ‘plugins’ which need to be carefully described ahead of time—but can then simply be used when assembling a complex system.

Our little team is supposed to be designing our own complex systems using operads, but we want to take advantage of the fact that Metron already has this working system, ExAMS. Thus, one thing I’d like to do is understand ExAMS in terms of operads and figure out how to do something exciting and new using this understanding. I was very happy when Tom Mifflin embraced this goal.

Unfortunately there’s no manual for ExAMS: the US government was willing to pay for the creation of this system, but not willing to pay for documentation. Luckily it seems fairly simple, at least the part that I care about. (There are a lot of other views derived from the activity trace, but I don’t need to worry about these.) Also, ExAMS uses some DoDAF standards which I can read about. Furthermore, in some ways it resembles UML and SySML, or more precisely, certain parts of these languages.

In particular, the ‘activity diagrams’ in UML are a lot like the activity traces in ExAMS. There’s an activity diagram at the top of this page, and another below, in which time proceeds down the page.

So, I plan to put some time into understanding the underlying math of these diagrams! If you know people who have studied them using ideas from category theory, please tell me.