The challenge of using communications infrastructure to stabilize other infrastructures is related to research on the collective communications systems in social animals, robots, and human-non-human interaction. In these systems, voting models can explicate patterns of observed behavior or predict collective outcomes. Developing more theoretical deductive explanatory power can increase our knowledge about the interplay of voters and communication that produces collective inferences. This paper suggests that many analyses of voting patterns have not integrated what is known about the predictive properties of voting processes into their analyses. Taking a more deductive approach enables us to think about the strengths and weaknesses of existing explanations and imagine new types of analysis that have implications for engineering communications systems to stabilize other infrastructures.

The concept of modeling multiple complex adaptive systems (CAS) as if they were voting processes proposes that an Error Resilient Data Fusion (ERDF) method can help to mitigate the effects of emergent properties in CAS system-of-systems (SoS). The property of emergence in a CAS composed of multiple, multi-modal sensors poses specific problems for fusion processes due to the difficulty in predicting and accounting for sensor performance under disparate environmental conditions. This paper compares the voting and Choquet integral fusion methods in the context of a multi-modal sensor ERDF SoS.