Nicole RustFragility of complex systems - leads?
I'm curious to widen my net wrt the different ways that complex systems can be fragile (versus robust). Any leads on good things to read?
To plant some seeds of different slices through it:
Adaptive systems (like ecosystems) tend to incorporate feedback. Fragility happens when a small change (eg in one node) leads to a catastrophe. These networks become more fragile as they increase in size:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-58440-6
It's really hard to engineer a complex system that is robust to catastrophic failures. For example, the 2003 NE US blackout happened when I single power line fell into a tree.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003)
Discussion of fragility is peppered all over. eg, here is an example of of it related to managing healthcare systems:
https://journals.lww.com/jonajournal/citation/2014/12000/handle_with_care__the_fragile_nature_of_complex.5.aspx
As these examples reflect, I'm really curious to learn about anything!
Fragility Limits Performance in Complex Networks - Scientific Reports
While numerous studies have suggested that large natural, biological, social, and technological networks are fragile, convincing theories are still lacking to explain why natural evolution and human design have failed to optimize networks and avoid fragility. In this paper we provide analytical and numerical evidence that a tradeoff exists in networks with linear dynamics, according to which general measures of robustness and performance are in fact competitive features that cannot be simultaneously optimized. Our findings show that large networks can either be robust to variations of their weights and parameters, or efficient in responding to external stimuli, processing noise, or transmitting information across long distances. As illustrated in our numerical studies, this performance tradeoff seems agnostic to the specific application domain, and in fact it applies to simplified models of ecological, neuronal, and traffic networks.
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