Dynamic Emergence of Features in Complex Systems

An epidemic involves numerous persons and institutions in handling and mitigating the situation which is characterized by medical urgency, time pressure, political pressure and aggravated by the need to act in partially unknown territory. Many fields of knowledge have to be brought together to fight the challenges. The individual organizations, their actors and the general public have to interact with one another and this often results in unexpected situations, behavior and results, we speak of emergent effects. Emergent effects sometimes are a welcomed support for actions taken, enhancing the desirable effects, but often they turn out the be counter-productive, reducing or even destroying the intended results. Emergent behavior of systems are a theoretically and practically challenging area of research. There is a rich knowledge about emergence in technical, medical and philosophical domains, for emergence in human behavior and societal issues there seems to be little knowledge available. Our contribution stresses the difference with respect to a system system between general properties on one side and and features on the other side (the relevant and characterizing properties of a complex system) and associate the phenomenon of emergence based on the feature set of a system.