Epistemological Levelism and Dynamical Complex Systems: The Case of Crowd Behaviour

The main aim of this paper is to show how the design and creation of computational models to study and simulate of the behaviour of dynamical complex systems, and in particular crowds of pedestrian, actually implicitly employs elements of a framework introduced by Luciano Floridi in his paper “The Method of Levels of Abstraction”. The example of the computer based simulation of the complex phenomenon of crowd dynamics and the related knowledge requiring different abstract levels and representation will be introduced in order to show how concepts like observables and system behaviour are commonly employed to compare and evaluate simulation models.