Complexity Measures in Decomposable Structures

This paper presents some measures of complexity of decomposable structures. The literature on complexity is reviewed and then the distinction among different measures of complexity is discussed. At first, a broad definition of complex systems is provided and the main characteristics of such systems are described briefly. Then, two particular kinds of measures are considered. The first group is based on information theory and deals with the concept of entropy. This index refers to the amount of information that we need in order to understand what is happening within a system. The authors claim that the entropy measure focuses only on the information complexity of a system without taking account of the interdependencies existing among the components. And finally, it was discussed the usefulness of both entropy and Kauffmans K value as appropriate measures of the complexity of decomposable structures.