Related papers: Critical fragility in socio-technical systems
Many systems on our planet are known to shift abruptly and irreversibly from one state to another when they are forced across a "tipping point," such as mass extinctions in ecological networks, cascading failures in infrastructure systems,…
The concept of communicability is introduced for complex socio-economic networks. The communicability function expresses how an impact propagates from one place to another in the network. This function is used to define unambiguously the…
We consider "time-of-use" pricing as a technique for matching supply and demand of temporal resources with the goal of maximizing social welfare. Relevant examples include energy, computing resources on a cloud computing platform, and…
Intelligent systems are increasingly integral to our daily lives, yet rare safety-critical events present significant latent threats to their practical deployment. Addressing this challenge hinges on accurately predicting the probability of…
We present an empirical analysis of the microstructure of financial markets and, in particular, of the static and dynamic properties of liquidity. We find that on relatively large time scales (15 minutes) large price fluctuations are…
Complex, interdependent systems are necessary to the delivery of goods and services critical to societal function. Here we demonstrate how interdependent systems respond to disruptions. Specifically, we change the spatial arrangement of a…
A prominent hypothesis in neuroscience proposes that brains achieve optimal performance by operating near a critical point. However, this framework, which often assumes a universal critical point, fails to account for the extensive…
Resilience is widely recognized as an important design goal though it is one that seems to escape a general and consensual understanding. Often mixed up with other system attributes; traditionally used with different meanings in as many…
Cyber-physical systems (CPS) integrate sensing, computing, communication and actuation capabilities to monitor and control operations in the physical environment. A key requirement of such systems is the need to provide predictable…
Complex systems such as ecological communities and neuron networks are essential parts of our everyday lives. These systems are composed of units which interact through intricate networks. The ability to predict sudden changes in the…
Labor market institutions are central for modern economies, and their polices can directly affect unemployment rates and economic growth. At the individual level, unemployment often has a detrimental impact on people's well-being and…
Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are required to satisfy safety constraints in various application domains such as robotics, industrial manufacturing systems, and power systems. Faults and cyber attacks have been shown to cause safety…
We model the production of complex goods in a large supply network. Each firm sources several essential inputs through relationships with other firms. Individual supply relationships are at risk of idiosyncratic failure, which threatens to…
This paper introduces a novel framework for analysing equilibrium in structured production systems incorporating a static social division of labour by distinguishing between consumption goods traded in competitive markets and intermediate…
Critical infrastructure networks are a key ingredient of modern society. We discuss a general method to spot the critical components of a critical infrastructure network, i.e. the nodes and the links fundamental to the perfect functioning…
Everyone wants clean air, peace and other public goods but is tempted to freeride on others' efforts. The usual way out of this dilemma is to impose norms, maintain reputations and incentivize individuals to contribute. In situations of…
From a stability perspective, a renewable generation (RG)-rich power system is a constrained system. As the quasistability boundary of a constrained system is structurally very different from that of an unconstrained system, finding the…
We consider stochastic electro-mechanical dynamics of an overdamped power system in the vicinity of the saddle-node bifurcation associated with the loss of global stability such as voltage collapse or phase angle instability. Fluctuations…
Temporal logics provide a formalism for expressing complex system specifications. A large body of literature has addressed the verification and the control synthesis problem for deterministic systems under such specifications. For…
An exciting application of crowdsourcing is to use social networks in complex task execution. In this paper, we address the problem of a planner who needs to incentivize agents within a network in order to seek their help in executing an…