All of us are confronted with complex phenomena occurring in daily life and in the living and inanimate nature surrounding us. Our scientific curiosity strives to unravel the mechanisms at work to create such complexity. Among various approaches to solve this problem, the field of synergetics, developed by Hermann Haken, has proven very successful as a general and interdisciplinary concept for describing and explaining complex phenomena that appear in systems under non-equilibrium conditions. These comprise dynamical states in evolving systems, spatial structure-forming processes, synchronization of states and regulatory mechanisms, and many other examples. The encompassing concepts have been applied to many disciplines, like physics, chemistry, biology, and beyond those also from synergetics to information theory, brain science, economics, and others.

Starting from basic methods of complexity research and synergetics, this volume contains thirty contributions on complex systems that exhibit spontaneous pattern formation far from thermal equilibrium. Written by international experts and young researchers assembled under one roof, this volume reflects state of the art research from a variety of scientific fields and disciplines where complexity theory and synergetics are important or even indispensable tools today and in the future.