Software became theprimary problem, and to rewrite the software would be overwhelming The alternative was to keep pushing till it broke. Unfortunately for the city of Denver, this happened at its new airport. Conventional software approach are powerless against such a complex system. Pushed just a little beyond its specifications, and the system breaks. The complexity overwhelms the conventional system.
Problems are hard to track, and much harder to solve.
Often, solutions are passed over for patches that merely treats the symptom. The system is a growing house of cards. Agent based methodology flies in the face of this conventional thinking. Complex problems are divided into small unique components interacting independently in a world shared by many. The interaction of individual units give rise to the system behavior, not specifically defined, but generally described.