Related papers: Phase Transitions in Collective Damage of Civil St…
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…
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,…
More than half of the world's population now lives in urban environments, which concentrate services and infrastructure to satisfy the material needs of a growing number of inhabitants. The interdependencies between physical infrastructure…
Infrastructure systems play a critical role in providing essential products and services for the functioning of modern society; however, they are vulnerable to disasters and their service disruptions can cause severe societal impacts. To…
Phase transitions, characterized by abrupt shifts between macroscopic patterns of organization, are ubiquitous in complex systems. Despite considerable research in the physical and natural sciences, the empirical study of this phenomenon in…
Demands on the disaster response capacity of the European Union are likely to increase, as the impacts of disasters continue to grow both in size and frequency. This has resulted in intensive research on issues concerning spatially-explicit…
Perturbed by natural hazards, community-level infrastructure networks operate like many-body systems, with behaviors emerging from coupling individual component dynamics with group correlations and interactions. It follows that we can…
The resilience of electric power grids is threatened by natural hazards. Climate-related hazards are becoming more frequent and intense due to climate change. Statistical analyses clearly demonstrate a rise in the number of incidents (power…
Current approaches to design flood-sensitive infrastructure typically assume a stationary rainfall distribution and neglect many uncertainties. These assumptions are inconsistent with observations that suggest intensifying extreme…
We introduce a new model that mimics the strong and sudden effects induced by conformity in tightly interacting human societies. Such effects range from mere crowd phenomena to dramatic political turmoil. The model is a modified version of…
We consider damage spreading transitions in the framework of mode-coupling theory. This theory describes relaxation processes in glasses in the mean-field approximation which are known to be characterized by the presence of an exponentially…
We consider a system of clusters made of elementary building blocks, monomers, and evolving via collisions between diffusing monomers and immobile composite clusters. In our model, the cluster-monomer collision can lead to the attachment of…
Cities are complex systems comprised of socioeconomic systems relying on critical services delivered by multiple physical infrastructure networks. Due to interdependencies between social and physical systems, disruptions caused by natural…
Ecosystems often undergo abrupt regime shifts in response to gradual external changes. These shifts are theoretically understood as a regime switch between alternative stable states of the ecosystem dynamical response to smooth changes in…
The possible paralelism existing between phase transitions and fracture in disordered materials, is discussed using the well-known Fiber Bundle Models and a probabilistic approach suited to smooth fluctuations near the critical point. Two…
One of the most important tasks of urban and hazard planning is to mitigate the damages and minimize the costs of the recovery process after catastrophic events. The rapidity and the efficiency of the recovery process are commonly referred…
Credibly assessing the resilience of energy infrastructure in the face of natural disasters is a salient concern facing researchers, government officials, and community members. Here, we explore the influence of the spatial distribution of…
Metastability is a physical phenomenon ubiquitous in first order phase transitions. A fruitful mathematical way to approach this phenomenon is the study of rare transitions Markov chains. For Metropolis chains associated with Statistical…
Climate change is amplifying extreme precipitation events in many regions and imposes substantial challenges for the resilience of road drainage infrastructure. Conventional design storm methodologies, which rely on historical trends of…
Understanding how cities transition from free-flowing to congested traffic remains a central open problem in urban science. Here we show that city-scale congestion undergoes a reproducible nonlinear transition analogous to an order-disorder…