On Various Measures of Complexity

Please find below a link to a document on the measurement of network complexity @ www.vcu.edu/csbc/pdfs/quantitative_measures.pdf It is a mathematical discussion of network complexity as applied to biological systems - however, its ideas can be adapted to IT systems - computer networks, workflows, etc. It is from Virginia Commonwealth University's Center of the Study of Biological Complexity (www.vcu.edu/csbc/)

Another study from the Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (www.casos.cs.cmu.edu/index.html) which you can find @ www.casos.cs.cmu.edu/publications/papers/Butts.AxiomaticApproach.pdf is an axiomatic approach to the question "What is an appropriate or correct complexity metric?". The conclusion is that those metrics that satisfy a set of reasonable axioms are not useful and one has to relax some axioms to get a useful complexity metric.

I found a very interesting and useful research report at Helsinki University of Technology by Antti M Latva-Koivisto titled "Finding a complexity measure for business process models" @ users.tkk.fi/~alatvako/Kompleksisuus-erikoistyo_2001-02-13.PDF in which the author states the results of his evaluation of several complexity measures applied to process flows. This author has used Excel and VBA and his conclusions (in a table at the end of his report) are that thes most robust complexity metrics applied to process flows are cyclomatic complexity and the "Tree" complexity metrics.