Related papers: Critical fragility in socio-technical systems
In complex systems, external parameters often determine the phase in which the system operates, i.e., its macroscopic behavior. For nearly a century, statistical physics has extensively studied systems' transitions across phases,…
A celebrated and controversial hypothesis conjectures that some biological systems --parts, aspects, or groups of them-- may extract important functional benefits from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and…
Systems that exhibit complex behaviours are often found in a particular dynamical condition, poised between order and disorder. This observation is at the core of the so-called criticality hypothesis, which states that systems in a…
Most models of complex systems have been homogeneous, i.e., all elements have the same properties (spatial, temporal, structural, functional). However, most natural systems are heterogeneous: few elements are more relevant, larger,…
Antifragility characterizes the benefit of a dynamical system derived from the variability in environmental perturbations. Antifragility carries a precise definition that quantifies a system's output response to input variability. Systems…
The hypothesis that living systems can benefit from operating at the vicinity of critical points has gained momentum in recent years. Criticality may confer an optimal balance between exceedingly ordered and too noisy states. We here…
We study the disequilibrium dynamics of a stylised model of production networks in which firms use perishable and non-substitutable intermediate inputs, so that adverse idiosyncratic productivity shocks can trigger downstream shortages and…
A key quality of any kind of system is its ability to deliver its respective service correctly. Often the unavailability of commercial systems may lead to lost revenue, which are minor compared to what may be at stake when critical…
Short-term survival and an exuberant plunge into building our future are generating a new kind of unintended consequence -- hidden fragility. This is a direct effect of the sophistication and structural complexity of the socio-technical…
Empirical evidence suggesting that living systems might operate in the vicinity of critical points, at the borderline between order and disorder, has proliferated in recent years, with examples ranging from spontaneous brain activity to…
Many safety-critical real-time systems operate under harsh environment and are subject to soft errors caused by transient or intermittent faults. It is critical and yet often very challenging to apply fault tolerance techniques in these…
Building resilience into today's complex infrastructures is critical to the daily functioning of society and its ability to withstand and recover from natural disasters, epidemics, and cyber-threats. This study proposes quantitative…
We consider the notion of resilience for cyber-physical systems, that is, the ability of the system to withstand adverse events while maintaining acceptable functionality. We use finite temporal logic to express the requirements on the…
The vicinity of phase transitions selectively amplifies weak stimuli, yielding optimal sensitivity to distinguish external input. Along with this enhanced sensitivity, enhanced levels of fluctuations at criticality reduce the specificity of…
Criticality has been proposed as a mechanism for the emergence of complexity, life, and computation, as it exhibits a balance between robustness and adaptability. In classic models of complex systems where structure and dynamics are…
Societal complexity may be at a historical peak. Distinct from entropy, complexity tends to rise as systems move away from order, crest at an intermediate state, and decline as entropy continues increasing. The use of a thermodynamic…
Advancements in computer science, artificial intelligence, and control systems of the recent have catalyzed the emergence of cybernetic societies, where algorithms play a significant role in decision-making processes affecting the daily…
``Self-Organised Criticality'' (SOC) is the mechanism by which complex systems spontaneously settle close to a *critical point*, at the edge between stability and chaos, and characterized by fat-tailed fluctuations and long-memory…
The deployment of machine learning in high-stakes services relies on ``human-in-the-loop'' architectures to mitigate algorithmic uncertainty. However, existing static policies fail to address a fundamental tension: algorithms suffer from…
Self-organized criticality is a well-established phenomenon, where a system dynamically tunes its structure to operate on the verge of a phase transition. Here, we show that the dynamics inside the self-organized critical state are…