C. Barrett, S. Eubank and M. Marathe(2006) "Modeling and Simulation of Large Biological, Information and Socio-Technical Systems: An Interaction Based Approach ."

This is a huge paper describing a huge model. Way too big for me to have any sens of how they could have possibly done all this. it sounds like science fiction. I wonder if it all reduces to a bunch of differential equations. They made super-large scale models of simulated cities (apparently of Portland) with simulations of transportation, telecommunication, public health/epidemiology and commodity markets all superimposed on each other. Again, i don't entirely get it. I guess the coolest outcome would be to do statistical physics on people. I'd have liked to have seen their results, but I guess that is still inthe works. This paper is mostly a description of the framework and theoretical foundations.

My inclination is to favor, just for myself, simple models that nurture intuition for a system. These types of approaches tend to be more about prediction than understanding.