Related papers: Critical fragility in socio-technical systems
Lifeline infrastructure underpins the continuity of daily life, yet conventional criticality assessments remain largely asset-centric, inferring importance from physical capacity or network topology rather than actual behavioral reliance.…
Abrupt shifts in ecosystems, brains, markets, and climate are often diagnosed as signs of approaching a tipping point, i.e. a critical bifurcation where stability is lost. Here we reveal a broader and more deceptive mechanism:…
Critical systems, such as those used in healthcare, defence, and disaster management, demand rigorous requirements engineering to ensure safety and reliability. Yet, much of this rigour has traditionally focused on technical assurance,…
This paper studies a stylized model of local interaction where agents choose from an ever increasing set of vertically ranked actions, e.g. technologies. The driving forces of the model are infrequent upward shifts (``updates''), followed…
Plasticity is a fundamental property of complex systems, such as the brain or an organism. Yet it typically remains a descriptive concept inferred retrospectively from observed outcomes, such as modifications in activity or morphology.…
Over the last decade new technologies for making large numbers of fine-grained measurements have led to the surprising discovery that many biological systems sit near a critical point. These systems are potentially more adaptive in that…
Security and safety are intertwined concepts in the world of computing. In recent years, the terms "sustainable security" and "sustainable safety" came into fashion and are being used referring to a variety of systems properties ranging…
The wide availability of data coupled with the computational advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning promise to enable many future technologies such as autonomous driving. While there has been a variety of successful…
Real time systems are systems in which there is a commitment for timely response by the computer to external stimuli. Real time applications have to function correctly even in presence of faults. Fault tolerance can be achieved by either…
Critical infrastructure systems must be both robust and resilient in order to ensure the functioning of society. To improve the performance of such systems, we often use risk and vulnerability analysis to find and address system weaknesses.…
Self-organized criticality has been proposed to be a universal mechanism for the emergence of scale-free dynamics in many complex systems, and possibly in the brain. While such scale-free patterns were identified experimentally in many…
Bifurcations can cause dynamical systems with slowly varying parameters to transition to far-away attractors. The terms ``critical transition'' or ``tipping point'' have been used to describe this situation. Critical transitions have been…
Nonlinear dynamical systems may be exposed to tipping points, critical thresholds at which small changes in the external inputs or in the systems parameters abruptly shift the system to an alternative state with a contrasting dynamical…
Time-limited states characterise many dynamical processes on networks: disease infected individuals recover after some time, people forget news spreading on social networks, or passengers may not wait forever for a connection. These…
Desirable system performance in the face of threats and disruptions has been characterized by various management concepts. Through semi-structured interviews with editors of journals in the fields of emergency response and systems…
It is ``folklore'' that the solution to a set reachability problem for a dynamical system is only noncomputable because of non-robustness reasons. A robustness condition that can be imposed on a dynamical system is the requirement of the…
The stability analysis of socioeconomic systems has been centered on answering whether small perturbations when a system is in a given quantitative state will push the system permanently to a different quantitative state. However, typically…
Mixed-criticality systems combine real-time components of different levels of criticality, i.e. severity of failure, on the same processor, in order to obtain good resource utilisation. They must guarantee deadlines of highly-critical tasks…
Within the cyber-physical-social-climate nexus, all systems are deeply interdependent: cyber infrastructure facilitates communication, data processing, and automation across physical systems (such as power grids and networks), while social…
In this chapter the complex systems are discussed in the context of economic and business policy and decision making. It will be showed and motivated that social systems are typically chaotic, non-linear and/or non-equilibrium and therefore…