Expansionist/context-sensitive methodology: engineering of complex adaptive systems

During the last ten years scientists in diverse fields such as economics, biology, and systems science have been asking the question, "What is it that makes some systems complex?" The traditional reductionist/mechanistic paradigm has failed to answer this system complexity question satisfactorily. An expansionist/context-sensitive system (CSS) paradigm, that includes the traditional reductionist/mechanistic view as a subset, is shown to facilitate understanding and designing complex adaptive systems (GAS). An expansionist system design and evaluation methodology, based on CSS theory, has been applied in a number of CAS applications, including distributed vehicle traffic control that is discussed in this paper as an example.