Related papers: Critical fragility in socio-technical systems

Using in a simple way the theory of non linear dynamical systems, we show that increasing climatic instabilities may be a qualitative warning sign for the occurrence of a nearby bifurcation, yielding a discontinuous and sudden climate…

Living systems operate in a critical dynamical regime -- between order and chaos -- where they are both resilient to perturbation, and flexible enough to evolve. To characterize such critical dynamics, the established 'structural theory' of…

The control of complex systems is an ongoing challenge of complexity research. Recent advances using concepts of structural control deduce a wide range of control related properties from the network representation of complex systems. Here,…

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis the role of strongly interconnected markets in fostering systemic instability has been increasingly acknowledged. Trade networks of commodities are susceptible to deleterious cascades of supply…

Recent work in the area of interdependent networks has focused on interactions between two systems of the same type. However, an important and ubiquitous class of systems are those involving monitoring and control, an example of…

This paper investigates the critical-time criteria as a security metric for controlled systems subject to sharp input anomalies (attack, fault), characterized by having high impact in a reduced amount of time (e.g. denial-of-service, attack…

In contemporary educational systems, academic performance indicators play a central role in institutional evaluation and in the interpretation of student trajectories. However, under conditions of rapid technological change, the inferential…

In this paper, we examine in an abstract framework, how a tradeoff between efficiency and robustness arises in different dynamic oligopolistic market architectures. We consider a market in which there is a monopolistic resource provider and…

Modern production systems are increasingly defined by dense networks of multi-tier sourcing dependencies, where localized upstream disruptions can cascade into system-wide collapses. While supply chain resilience has garnered significant…

Rigidity is an emergent property of materials - it is not a feature of individual components that comprise the structure, but instead arises from interactions between many constituent parts. Recently, it has been recognized that…

We study the temporal robustness of stochastic signals. This topic is of particular interest in interleaving processes such as multi-agent systems where communication and individual agents induce timing uncertainty. For a deterministic…

Aiming at analyzing performance in cloud computing, some unpredictable perturbations which may lead to performance downgrade are essential factors that should not be neglected. To avoid performance downgrade in cloud computing system, it is…

Catastrophic transitions, where a system shifts abruptly between alternate steady states, are a generic feature of many nonlinear systems. Recently these regime shift were suggested as the mechanism underlies many ecological catastrophes,…

The critical state is assumed to be optimal for any computation in recurrent neural networks, because criticality maximizes a number of abstract computational properties. We challenge this assumption by evaluating the performance of a…

Modern manufacturing systems must meet hard delivery deadlines while coping with stochastic task durations caused by process noise, equipment variability, and human intervention. Traditional deterministic schedules break down when reality…

The digital revolution has brought ethical crossroads of technology, behavior and truth. However, the need of a comprehensive and constructive ethical framework is emerging as digital platforms have been used to build a global chaotic and…

We introduce a simple model for addressing the controversy in the study of financial systems, sometimes taken as brownian-like processes and other as critical systems with fluctuations of arbitrary magnitude. The model considers a…

This paper addresses a critical gap in the risk assessment of AI-enabled safety-critical systems. While these systems, where AI systems assists human operators, function as complex socio-technical systems, existing risk evaluation methods…

Traditional social organizations such as those for the management of healthcare and civil defence are the result of designs and realizations that matched well with an operational context considerably different from the one we are…

Technological systems increasingly mediate human information exchange, spanning interactions among humans as well as between humans and artificial agents. The unprecedented scale and reliance on information disseminated through these…