Related papers: Statistical Physics of Design
Classic problem-space theory models problem solving as a navigation through a structured space of states, operators, goals, and constraints. Systems Engineering (SE) employs analogous constructs (functional analysis, operational analysis,…
[Context & Motivation] Adaptive systems are an important research area. The dominant reason for adaptivity in systems are changes in the environment. Thus, it is an important question how to model the environment and how to determine the…
The concept of resilience embodies the quest towards the ability to sustain shocks, to suffer from these shocks as little as possible, for the shortest time possible, and to recover with the full functionalities that existed before the…
Competing styles of Statistical Mechanics have been introduced as practical succedaneous to the conventional well established Boltzmann-Gibbs statistical mechanics, when in the use of the latter the researcher is impaired in his/her…
This special volume of Statistical Sciences presents some innovative, if not provocative, ideas in the area of reliability, or perhaps more appropriately named, integrated system assessment. In this age of exponential growth in science,…
Many complex systems satisfy a set of constraints on their degrees of freedom, and at the same time, they are able to work and adapt to different conditions. Here, we describe the emergence of this ability in a simplified model in which the…
Systems engineering processes coordinate the effort of different individuals to generate a product satisfying certain requirements. As the involved engineers are self-interested agents, the goals at different levels of the systems…
The behavior of complex systems is determined not only by the topological organization of their interconnections but also by the dynamical processes taking place among their constituents. A faithful modeling of the dynamics is essential…
Complexity science offers a wide range of measures for quantifying unpredictability, structure, and information. Yet, a systematic conceptual organization of these measures is still missing. We present a unified framework that locates…
Physical properties of materials are seldom studied in the context of packing problems. In this work we study the behavior of semifluids: materials with particular characteristics, that share properties both with solids and with fluids. We…
The increasing recognition of the association between adverse human health conditions and many environmental substances as well as processes has led to the need to monitor them. An important problem that arises in environmental statistics…
Stress-strain curves, or more generally, stress functions, are an extremely important characterization of a material's mechanical properties. However, stress functions are often difficult to derive and are narrowly tailored to a specific…
Starting from the pioneering works on software architecture precious guidelines have emerged to indicate how computer programs should be organized. For example the "separation of concerns" suggests to split a program into modules that…
The statistical mechanics of Gibbs is a juxtaposition of subjective, probabilistic ideas on the one hand and objective, mechanical ideas on the other. In this paper, we follow the path set out by Jaynes, including elements added…
LECTURE GIVEN AT TH2002. Given a set of Boolean variables, and some constraints between them, is it possible to find a configuration of the variables which satisfies all constraints? This problem, which is at the heart of combinatorial…
We present an intermediate-level course on sustainable physics, which combines lectures and student projects. Sustainable physics concepts are progressively introduced through both a global and a specialized perspective: climate change and…
Today, software-intensive systems are increasingly being developed in a globally distributed way. However, besides its benefit, global development also bears a set of risks and problems. One critical factor for successful project management…
The relationship between micro-structure and macro-structure of complex systems using information geometry has been dealt by several authors. From this perspective, we are going to apply it as a geometrical structure connecting both…
State-space systems encompass a broad class of algorithms used for modeling and forecasting time series. For such systems to be effective, two objectives must be met: (i) accurate point forecasts of the time series must be produced, and…
Inverse problems in statistical physics are motivated by the challenges of `big data' in different fields, in particular high-throughput experiments in biology. In inverse problems, the usual procedure of statistical physics needs to be…