CSRC

to capture the behaviors of diff erent social, economic and technical actors, which may be defi ned at various levels of abstraction. It is applied to understanding their interactions and can be adapted to include learning processes and emergent patterns. CASCADE models 'prosumer' agents (i.e., producers and/or consumers of energy) and 'aggregator' agents (e.g., traders of energy in both wholesale and retail markets) at various scales, from large generators and Energy Service Companies down to individual people and devices. The CASCADE Framework is formed of three main subdivisions that link models of electricity supply and demand, the electricity market and power fl ow. It can also model the variability of renewable energy generation caused by the weather, which is an important issue for grid balancing and the profi tability of energy suppliers. The development of CASCADE has already yielded some interesting early fi ndings, demonstrating that it is possible for a mediating agent (aggregator) to achieve stable demandfl attening across groups of domestic households fi tted with smart energy control and communication devices, where direct wholesale price signals had previously been found to produce characteristic complex system instability. In another example, it has demonstrated how large changes in supply mix can be caused even by small changes in demand profi le. Ongoing and planned refi nements

Social systems are evolving, multi-scale, spatio-temporal structures with emergent functions, needs and capabilities. One sensible definition of an ' extreme ' event would be one that led to some qualitative, structural change in the system, as it went beyond the current ' control limits ' of the system. Indeed, we can view any current structure and organization that characterize a system as being forged out of the past events and crises that led to change and innovation. Each individual, group, firm, corporation, shareholder and observer experience ' pathdependent learning ' , whereby current learning is conditional by the events and decisions taken in the past. In reality, the ' new ' system or structure that comes into being at a given time, although initially seen as a successful response to some past problem, will move into an unknowable future that will necessarily end in some new crisis, the emergence of some unexpected new factors, effects or implications that will have to be dealt with. A simple probabilistic model of event dynamics is presented showing that the discussions of power laws and self-organized criticality assume a stationary situation and the probability of given events. We contrast this with examples from human systems that are about qualitative, structural change and path-dependent learning. The first example involves the handling of severe motorway traffic accidents and the second describes the evolution of supply chains by trial and error, as new practices are adopted or rejected in a changing competitive economic environment. Social and economic systems must evolve, and will do so through the occurrence of seemingly ' extreme ' events, requiring adaptation and change. The important lesson therefore is to accept that there will be always a potential for unexpected and surprising events and that we need to build systems that are robust and resilient to their occurrence.

In the aerospace industry competitive advantage is searched through product innovation. This paper sets out to explore the effects that relationship development in the commercial aerospace supply chains have on innovation and competitive advantage. A perspective of supply chains as complex activity networks is used for data analysis based on in-depth interviews in a global setting. Applying these concepts of supply chains as the interaction of multiple work activities assists in comprehending the forces of change. The processes of change are characterized by expansive learning processes of creating instruments for initializing, developing and sustaining these relationships. These processes take place in a terrain of complex power exercises. The long-term effects are totally dependent on nurturing the relationships. The findings may be useful to practitioners in understanding how implementation of successful supply chain changes may come about. It promotes risk-sharing partnerships as instruments for innovation. The paper provides evidence of changing relationships in commercial aerospace supply chains.

The consequences of complexity science is inevitable for our understanding of the emergence and evolution of identity and diversity in ecologies and human social systems. Resulting from evolutionary processes in which successive behavioural explorations occurred which enabled the capturing of resources in the system. By comparing examples studying the evolution and co-evolution of Darwin’s Finches, of economic markets and organizational forms and of social entities, the chapter offers a view of evolution in human systems that challenges traditional and reductionistic theories of biological determinism. Identities are created and co-evolve in an on-going evolutionary process. Even though one cannot understand what exactly creates the micro-diversity underlying a system, it can be established that all the underlying phenomena obey the same kind of behaviour – that of evolving complex systems. By allowing ourselves to be “evolvers” and by exploring our own diversity, a richer set of possibilities are created on which the collective system can thrive.

The residential housing sector is a major consumer of energy accounting for approximately one third of carbon emissions in the United Kingdom. Achieving a sustainable, low-carbon infrastructure necessitates a reduced and more efficient use of domestic energy supplies. Energy service companies offer an alternative to traditional providers, which supply a single utility product to satisfy the unconstrained demand of end users, and have been identified as a potentially important actor in sustainable future economies. An agent-based model is developed to examine the potential of energy service companies to contribute to the large scale upgrading of household energy efficiency, which would ultimately lead to a more sustainable and secure energy infrastructure. The migration of households towards energy service companies is described by an attractiveness array, through which potential customers can evaluate the future benefits, in terms of household energy costs, of changing provider. It is shown that self-financing is a limiting factor to the widespread upgrading of residential energy efficiency. Greater reductions in household energy costs could be achieved by committing to longer term contracts, allowing upgrade costs to be distributed over greater time intervals. A steadily increasing cost of future energy usage lends an element of stability to the market, with energy service companies displaying the ability to retain customers on contract expiration. The model highlights how a greater focus on the provision of energy services, as opposed to consumable products, presents a viable approach to reducing future energy costs and usage.

Infrastructure, which is used to extract, transport, store, and transform resources into products or services to meet our utility needs faces numerous challenges caused by the agency of the various actors in the system. To understand these challenges, we propose it is necessary to move beyond considering each utility system as a distinct silo. In this paper, a conversion points approach is developed to characterize multiutility systems at any scale and for any specific or theoretical location. The story is told of the development of a conversion points approach and its application is examined using an agent-based model. Transport, energy, water, waste, and telecommunications systems are governed and run independently but in practice are highly interdependent. A way to represent all utility systems in an integrated way is described and the benefits of this representation are applied to UK household consumers.

Infrastructure is a means to an end: it is built, maintained and expanded in order to enable the functioning of society. Present infrastructure operation is characterised by: governance based on unmanaged growing demand, which is both inefficient and ultimately unsustainable; lack of integration of the end-users, in terms of the variety of their wants, needs and behaviours; separate and parallel delivery of different infrastructure streams prohibiting joint solutions. To achieve long-term sustainability, infrastructure needs to be designed and operated to provide essential service delivery at radically decreased levels of resource use. This new approach will need to:

Review application of complexity methods to energy systems and systems change. Attributes: self-organisation, path dependency, emergence, co-evolution, adaptation. Modelling approaches: agent-based models, dynamic network models. Long-term energy systems change: co-evolutionary framework. Policy challenges: systemic interactions, decision-making under uncertainty.

This paper reviews existing up-to-date literature related to individual household energy consumption. The how and why individual behaviour affects energy use are discussed, together with the principles and perspectives which have so far been considered in order to explain the habitual consuming behaviour. The research gaps, which are revealed from previous studies in terms of the limitations or assumptions on the methodology to alter individuals' energy usage, give insights for a conceptual framework to define a comprehensive approach. The proposed framework suggests that the individual energy perception gaps are affected by psychological, habitual, structural and cultural variables in a wider-contextual, meso-societal and micro-individual spectrum. All these factors need to be considered in order for a variety of combined intervention methods, which are discussed and recommended, to introduce a more effective shift in the conventional energy-consuming behaviour, advancing insights for successful energy policies.