Related papers: Managing Complexity
The study of intelligent systems explains behaviour in terms of economic rationality. This results in an optimization principle involving a function or utility, which states that the system will evolve until the configuration of maximum…
The current science of cities can provide a useful foundation for future urban policies, provided that these proposals have been validated by correct observations of the diversity of situations in the world. However, international…
Electromechanical systems manage physical processes through a network of inter-connected components. Today, programming the interactions required for coordinating these components is largely a manual process. This process is time-consuming…
This paper revisits the classic instrument choice problem in a setting with consumption externalities, through the lens of robust mechanism design. A regulator can implement any incentive-compatible policy but is uncertain about how…
Stylized facts can be regarded as constraints for any modeling attempt of price dynamics on a financial market, in that an empirically reasonable model has to reproduce these stylized facts at least qualitatively. The dynamics of market…
Living systems operate far from equilibrium, yet few general frameworks provide global bounds on biological transients. In high-dimensional biological networks like ecosystems, long transients arise from the separate timescales of…
Analyzing and controlling system entropy is a powerful tool for regulating predictability of control systems. Applications benefiting from such approaches range from reinforcement learning and data security to human-robot collaboration. In…
In the present paper, we identify several distributions from Physics and study their applicability to phenomena such as distribution of income, wealth, and expenditure. Firstly, we apply logistic distribution to these data and we find that…
The purpose of this review paper is to present some recent results on the modeling and control of large systems of agents. We focus on particular applications where the agents are capable of independent actions instead of simply reacting to…
Notwithstanding the usefulness of system dynamics in analyzing complex policy problems, policy design is far from straightforward and in many instances trial-and-error driven. To address this challenge, we propose to combine system dynamics…
This paper discusses serious drawbacks of existing knowledge in macroeconomics and finance in explaining and predicting economic and financial phenomena. Complexity science is proposed as an alternative approach to be used in order to…
A novel method for control of dynamical systems, proposed in the paper, ensures an output signal belonging to the given set at any time. The method is based on a special change of coordinates such that the initial problem with given…
Chemical processes in closed systems are poorly controllable since they always relax to equilibrium. Living systems avoid this fate and give rise to a much richer diversity of phenomena by operating under nonequilibrium conditions. Recent…
Classic economic science is reaching the limits of its explanatory powers. Complexity science uses an increasingly larger set of different methods to analyze physical, biological, cultural, social, and economic factors, providing a broader…
We consider overdamped physical systems evolving under a feedback-controlled fluctuating potential and in contact with a thermal bath at temperature $T$. A Markovian description of the dynamics, which keeps only the last value of the…
We introduce a systematic classification method for the analogs of phase transitions in finite systems. This completely general analysis, which is applicable to any physical system and extends towards the thermodynamic limit, is based on…
Complexity science offers a wide range of measures for quantifying unpredictability, structure, and information. Yet, a systematic conceptual organization of these measures is still missing. We present a unified framework that locates…
Adaptive dynamical systems arise in a multitude of contexts, e.g., optimization, control, communications, signal processing, and machine learning. A precise characterization of their fundamental limitations is therefore of paramount…
Model-based Reinforcement Learning and Control have demonstrated great potential in various sequential decision making problem domains, including in robotics settings. However, real-world robotics systems often present challenges that limit…
This paper presents a new technique for the design of approximate reasoning based controllers for dynamic physical systems with interacting goals. In this approach, goals are achieved based on a hierarchy defined by a control knowledge base…