Measuring the Complexity of a Higraph-based System Model: Formalism and Metrics

The exponential growing effort, cost and time investment of complex systems in modeling phase emphasize the need for a methodology, a framework and a environment to handle the system model complexity. For that, it is necessary to be able to measure the system model complexity. This paper highlights the requirements a model needs to fulfill to match human user expectations, presents a generic framework for designing complex systems, and suggests a graph-based formalism for modeling complex systems. Finally, a way to measure system model structural complexity based on Shannon theory of information is proposed and illustrated with an example.