Related papers: Critical fragility in socio-technical systems
Designing sustainable systems involves complex interactions between environmental resources, social impacts, and economic issues. In a constrained world, the challenge is to achieve a balanced design across those dimensions while avoiding…
Systemic risk refers to the risk that the financial system is susceptible to failures due to the characteristics of the system itself. The tremendous cost of systemic risk requires the design and implementation of tools for the efficient…
Critical infrastructure is not indestructible. Threats, both emergent and systemic, have propagated beyond historical norms that risk mitigation efforts alone cannot alleviate. Interdependencies between infrastructural systems compound…
The blockchain technology promises to transform finance, money and even governments. However, analyses of blockchain applicability and robustness typically focus on isolated systems whose actors contribute mainly by running the consensus…
Sensitivity to small changes in the environment is crucial for many real-world tasks, enabling living and artificial systems to make correct behavioral decisions. It has been shown that such sensitivity is maximized when a system operates…
The complexity of the operating environment and required technologies for highly automated driving is unprecedented. A different type of threat to safe operation besides the fault-error-failure model by Laprie et al. arises in the form of…
We study the conditions under which input-output networks can dynamically attain a competitive equilibrium, where markets clear and profits are zero. We endow a classical firm network model with minimal dynamical rules that reduce…
Systemic risk refers to the overall vulnerability arising from the high degree of interconnectedness and interdependence within the financial system. In the rapidly developing decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem, numerous studies have…
Understanding how network structure constrains and enables information processing is a central problem in the statistical mechanics of interacting systems. Here we study random networks across the structural percolation transition and…
The fragility of financial systems was starkly demonstrated in early 2023 through a cascade of major bank failures in the United States, including the second, third, and fourth largest collapses in the US history. The highly interdependent…
Tipping behavior can occur when an equilibrium of a dynamical system loses stability in response to a slowly varying parameter crossing a bifurcation threshold, or where noise drives a system from one attractor to another, or some…
Maintaining stability in feedback systems, from aircraft and autonomous robots to biological and physiological systems, relies on monitoring their behavior and continuously adjusting their inputs. Incremental damage can make such control…
Stochastic models such as Continuous-Time Markov Chains (CTMC) and Stochastic Hybrid Automata (SHA) are powerful formalisms to model and to reason about the dynamics of biological systems, due to their ability to capture the stochasticity…
Randomly-assembled dynamical systems are theoretically predicted to be unstable upon crossing a critical threshold of complexity, as first shown by May. Yet, empirical complex systems exhibit remarkable stability, indicating the presence of…
Research in Responsible AI has developed a range of principles and practices to ensure that machine learning systems are used in a manner that is ethical and aligned with human values. However, a critical yet often neglected aspect of…
A hard real-time system cannot miss any deadline. A weakly-hard real-time system, on the contrary, is designed to tolerate a specific number of deadline misses. For instance, the AnyMiss(2, 300) weakly-hard constraint stipulates that in…
Our societies are increasingly dependent on services supplied by computers & their software. New technology only exacerbates this dependence by increasing the number, performance, and degree of autonomy and inter-connectivity of…
In large groups, every collaborative act requires balancing two pressures: the need to achieve behavioural synchrony and the need to keep free riding to a minimum. This paper introduces a model of collaboration that requires both…
The design and operation of protective systems is an essential engineering responsibility. Ensuring public safety, while essential, must be accomplished at a feasible cost and within government regulation. Hence, protective system design…
Nonlinear dynamical systems subjected to a combination of noise and time-varying forcing can exhibit sudden changes, critical transitions or tipping points where large or rapid dynamic effects arise from changes in a parameter that are…