Assessment of Complexity

In his book about chaos, Gleick (1988) describes how the meteorologist E. Lorenz in 1961 found that small numerical errors in the initial conditions for his deterministic model of the weather could unfold into simulated catastrophes. A similar threat is real for automated large scale systems that contain deterministic subsystems whose behavior is described by difference equations. The appreciation that small errors in the design, measuring device, or (human) control action are also subject to the so-called Butterfly Effect induces stress upon the human supervisory task.