Introduction to Focus Issue: Recent advances in modeling complex systems: Theory and applications.

This is an introductory paper of the Focus Issue Recent advances in modeling complex systems: Theory and applications, where papers presenting new advances and insights into chaotic dynamics, fractional dynamics, complex oscillations, complex traffic dynamics, and complex networks, as well as their applications, are collected. All these different problems share common ideas and methods and provide new perspectives for further progress in the modeling of complex systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]