Emergence, Self-Organization and Collective Intelligence -- Modeling the Dynamics of Complex Collectives in Social and Organizational Settings

A number of natural and social systems often demonstrate emergent behaviours resulting from limited local interactions among their constituent parts. The emergent and self-organizing behaviours seen in many such distributed systems are closely congruent to the phenomenon of collective intelligence. Emergence and self-organization often occur together and appear to be subsumed within a broader framework of collective intelligence in distributed systems. Collective intelligence, the ability of a group to exhibit greater intelligence than its individual members, is result of various distributed interaction mechanisms, which are quite similar to the so-far identified mechanisms and underlying structures of emergence and self-organization. This paper presents a short analytical survey of the concepts and characteristic properties of emergence, self-organization and collective intelligence and tries to establish the strong similarity and inter-relatedness in them. The complex non-linear dynamics found in systems exhibiting these properties is not reducible to individual parts and therefore require a generative modeling approach of analysis. The Agent-based modeling and simulation approach seems the most suitable choice, as is also demonstrated through an example of agent-based simulation of obstacle handling in a collective setting.