This book, the first in a series on this subject, is the outcome of many years of efforts to give a new all-encompassing approach to complex systems in nature based on chaos theory. While maintaining a high level of rigor, the authors avoid an overly complicated mathematical apparatus, making the book accessible to a wider interdisciplinary readership.

This review volume is devoted to a discussion of analogies and differences of complex production systems - natural, as in biological cells, or man-made, as in economic systems or industrial production. Taking this unified look at production is based on two observations: Cells and many biological networks are complex production units that have evolved to solve production problems in a reliable and optimal way in a highly stochastic environment. On the other hand, industrial production is becoming increasingly complex and often hard to predict. As a result, modeling and control of such...

What is life? What type of system is life? How can we understand life? Or what does "understanding life" really mean? Sixty years since the publication of What Is Life? by Schrodinger ] and after the rise and success of molecular biology, have we reached the answer to these questions? In the recent years, I have often been asked by young researchers and students in biology: "I am afraid that such basic questions on a life system itself are not answered by the main-stream approach of c- rent biology that elucidates molecules and genes. We need some alternative approach....

This book, the first in a series on this subject, is the outcome of many years of efforts to give a new all-encompassing approach to complex systems in nature based on chaos theory. While maintaining a high level of rigor, the authors avoid an overly complicated mathematical apparatus, making the book accessible to a wider interdisciplinary readership.