Elements about the Emergence Issue: A Survey of Emergence Definitions

Emergence, a concept that first appeared in philosophy, has been widely explored in the domain of complex systems and is sometimes considered to be the key ingredient that makes ‘complex systems’ ‘complex’. Our goal in this paper is to give a broad survey of emergence definitions, to extract a shared definition structure and to discuss some of the remaining issues. We do not know of any comparable surveys about the emergence concept. For this presentation, we start from a broadly applicable approach and finish with more specific propositions. We first present five selected works with a short analysis of each. We then propose a merged analysis in which we isolate a common structure through all definitions but also what we think needs further research. Finally, we briefly describe some perspectives about the emergence engine idea also referred to as emergent engineering.

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