Related papers: Critical fragility in socio-technical systems
In a large cyber-physical system, a temporal inconsistency of an output value can arise if there is a non-negligible delay between the instant when a sensor value is acquired from the environment and the instant when a setpoint, based on…
We show that fluid organizations display higher levels of cooperation than attainable by groups with either a fixed social structure or lacking one altogether. By moving within the organization, individuals cause restructurings that…
Systems in many safety-critical application domains are subject to certification requirements. In such a system, there are typically different applications providing functionalities that have varying degrees of criticality. Consequently,…
In this paper we characterise the propensity of big capital investments to systematically deliver poor outcomes as "fragility," a notion suggested by Nassim Taleb. A thing or system that is easily harmed by randomness is fragile. We argue…
Computing tight over-approximation of reach sets of a controlled uncertain dynamical system is a common practice in verification of safety-critical cyber-physical systems (CPS). While several algorithms are available for this purpose, they…
Time-invariant finite-dimensional systems, under reasonable continuity assumptions, exhibit the property that if solutions exist for all future times, the set of vectors reachable from a bounded set of initial conditions over bounded time…
Social systems must fulfil four basic functions to ensure their survival in competitive conditions. Social systems must provide for: (1) energy and other necessities of life, (2) security against external and internal threats, (3) identity…
We study online mechanisms for preemptive scheduling with deadlines, with the goal of maximizing the total value of completed jobs. This problem is fundamental to deadline-aware cloud scheduling, but there are strong lower bounds even for…
Self-organized criticality is characterized by power law correlations in the non-equilibrium steady state of externally driven systems. A dynamical system proposed here self-organizes itself to a critical state with no characteristic size…
The strains associated with shift work decrease healthcare workers' well-being. However, shift schedules adapted to their individual needs can partially mitigate these problems. From a computing perspective, shift scheduling was so far…
Self-adaptive systems increasingly operate in close interaction with humans, often sharing the same physical or virtual environments and making decisions with ethical implications at runtime. Current approaches typically encode ethics as…
Critical infrastructure protection (CIP) is envisioned to be one of the most challenging security problems in the coming decade. One key challenge in CIP is the ability to allocate resources, either personnel or cyber, to critical…
Following the financial crisis of 2007-2008, a deep analogy between the origins of instability in financial systems and complex ecosystems has been pointed out: in both cases, topological features of network structures influence how easily…
Mixed-criticality real-time scheduling has been developed to improve resource utilization while guaranteeing safe execution of critical applications. These studies use optimistic resource reservation for all the applications to improve…
We propose a control-theoretic interpretation of recommender systems and use this perspective to analyze how fairness interventions shape long-term system behavior. Fairness concerns arise for both users and creators, ranging from opinion…
Various simulation-based and analytical methods have been developed to evaluate the seismic fragilities of individual structures. However, a community's seismic safety and resilience are substantially affected by network reliability,…
Internet is the linchpin of modern society, which the various threads of modern life weave around. But being a part of the bigger energy-guzzling industrial economy, it is vulnerable to disruption. It is widely believed that our society is…
In environments with uncertainties or undesirable influences, control systems can require additional energy to achieve their task while remaining resilient to these influences. In this paper, we present an energetic resilience metric that…
There is mounting empirical evidence that many communities of living organisms display key features which closely resemble those of physical systems at criticality. We here introduce a minimal model framework for the dynamics of a community…
Temporal logics over finite traces have recently seen wide application in a number of areas, from business process modelling, monitoring, and mining to planning and decision making. However, real-life dynamic systems contain a degree of…