Resilience: A System Interpretation

Resilience has increasingly become a crucial subject to evaluate the function of various real-world systems from ecology, social sciences, and medicine to engineering, critical infrastructure, and the built environment - as our planet and its constituent systems are undergoing a rising trend of perturbations, uncertainty, and change due to natural, human and technological causes. The absence of resilience measures within systems causes the systems not only to deviate from their intended functions under perturbations but also allows the systems themselves to become inefficient and obsolete in the face of the rapidly changing requirements with considerable social, environmental, and economic consequences. Despite its ubiquitous use and practical significance, the term resilience is often poorly and inconsistently used in various disciplines, hindering its universal understanding and application. There is a broad acknowledgment in the literature of a lack of consensus on whether resilience is an inherent system characteristic or a management process. Hence, this thesis adopts a holistic approach giving resilience a system interpretation and argues that much of the resilience literature covers the existing ground in that existing engineering systems stability ideas are being reinvented. The approach used here follows modern control systems theory as the comparison framework, where each system, irrespective of its disciplinary association, is represented in terms of inputs, state, and outputs. Modern control systems theory is adopted because of its cohesiveness and universality. The resilience system interpretation framework defines resilience as adaptive systems and adaptation, where the system has the ability to respond to perturbations and changes through passive and active feedback mechanisms—returning the system state or system form to a starting position or transitioning to another suitable state or form. Various case examples, from plain lumped mass and simple pendulum dynamic systems to, traffic flow and building structure dynamic systems, are utilized to illustrate the resilience system interpretation framework proposed in the thesis. The thesis provides a conceptual cross-disciplinary system framework that offers the potential for a greater understanding of resilience and the elimination of overlap in the literature, particularly as it relates to terminology. In addition, using state-space approaches it quantitively as well as qualitatively evaluates the resilience of cross-disciplinary case systems by utilizing the system's inherent characteristics and management processes. The thesis will be of interest to both academics and practitioners involved in resilience analysis, measurement, and design across various engineering disciplines and by extension any other discipline to enable proactive responses to perturbations while actively adapting to change

2nd Symposium on Management of Future motorway and urban Traffic Systems (MFTS 2018): Booklet of abstracts: Ispra, 11-12 June 2018

The Symposium focuses on future traffic management systems, covering the subjects of traffic control, estimation, and modelling of motorway and urban networks, with particular emphasis on the presence of advanced vehicle communication and automation technologies. As connectivity and automation are being progressively introduced in our transport and mobility systems, there is indeed a growing need to understand the implications and opportunities for an enhanced traffic management as well as to identify innovative ways and tools to optimise traffic efficiency. In particular the debate on centralised versus decentralised traffic management in the presence of connected and automated vehicles has started attracting the attention of the research community. In this context, the Symposium provides a remarkable opportunity to share novel ideas and discuss future research directions.JRC.C.4-Sustainable Transpor

Network resilience

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, and social convention changes in human and animal networks. Such a regime shift demonstrates a system's resilience that characterizes the ability of a system to adjust its activity to retain its basic functionality in the face of internal disturbances or external environmental changes. In the past 50 years, attention was almost exclusively given to low dimensional systems and calibration of their resilience functions and indicators of early warning signals without considerations for the interactions between the components. Only in recent years, taking advantages of the network theory and lavish real data sets, network scientists have directed their interest to the real-world complex networked multidimensional systems and their resilience function and early warning indicators. This report is devoted to a comprehensive review of resilience function and regime shift of complex systems in different domains, such as ecology, biology, social systems and infrastructure. We cover the related research about empirical observations, experimental studies, mathematical modeling, and theoretical analysis. We also discuss some ambiguous definitions, such as robustness, resilience, and stability.Comment: Review chapter

Software for Exascale Computing - SPPEXA 2016-2019

This open access book summarizes the research done and results obtained in the second funding phase of the Priority Program 1648 "Software for Exascale Computing" (SPPEXA) of the German Research Foundation (DFG) presented at the SPPEXA Symposium in Dresden during October 21-23, 2019. In that respect, it both represents a continuation of Vol. 113 in Springer’s series Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering, the corresponding report of SPPEXA’s first funding phase, and provides an overview of SPPEXA’s contributions towards exascale computing in today's sumpercomputer technology. The individual chapters address one or more of the research directions (1) computational algorithms, (2) system software, (3) application software, (4) data management and exploration, (5) programming, and (6) software tools. The book has an interdisciplinary appeal: scholars from computational sub-fields in computer science, mathematics, physics, or engineering will find it of particular interest

Book of abstracts of the 24th Euro Working Group on Transportation Meeting

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Mastering Uncertainty in Mechanical Engineering

This open access book reports on innovative methods, technologies and strategies for mastering uncertainty in technical systems. Despite the fact that current research on uncertainty is mainly focusing on uncertainty quantification and analysis, this book gives emphasis to innovative ways to master uncertainty in engineering design, production and product usage alike. It gathers authoritative contributions by more than 30 scientists reporting on years of research in the areas of engineering, applied mathematics and law, thus offering a timely, comprehensive and multidisciplinary account of theories and methods for quantifying data, model and structural uncertainty, and of fundamental strategies for mastering uncertainty. It covers key concepts such as robustness, flexibility and resilience in detail. All the described methods, technologies and strategies have been validated with the help of three technical systems, i.e. the Modular Active Spring-Damper System, the Active Air Spring and the 3D Servo Press, which have been in turn developed and tested during more than ten years of cooperative research. Overall, this book offers a timely, practice-oriented reference guide to graduate students, researchers and professionals dealing with uncertainty in the broad field of mechanical engineering

A case for Sandia investment in complex adaptive systems science and technology.

This white paper makes a case for Sandia National Laboratories investments in complex adaptive systems science and technology (S&T) -- investments that could enable higher-value-added and more-robustly-engineered solutions to challenges of importance to Sandia's national security mission and to the nation. Complex adaptive systems are ubiquitous in Sandia's national security mission areas. We often ignore the adaptive complexity of these systems by narrowing our 'aperture of concern' to systems or subsystems with a limited range of function exposed to a limited range of environments over limited periods of time. But by widening our aperture of concern we could increase our impact considerably. To do so, the science and technology of complex adaptive systems must mature considerably. Despite an explosion of interest outside of Sandia, however, that science and technology is still in its youth. What has been missing is contact with real (rather than model) systems and real domain-area detail. With its center-of-gravity as an engineering laboratory, Sandia's has made considerable progress applying existing science and technology to real complex adaptive systems. It has focused much less, however, on advancing the science and technology itself. But its close contact with real systems and real domain-area detail represents a powerful strength with which to help complex adaptive systems science and technology mature. Sandia is thus both a prime beneficiary of, as well as potentially a prime contributor to, complex adaptive systems science and technology. Building a productive program in complex adaptive systems science and technology at Sandia will not be trivial, but a credible path can be envisioned: in the short run, continue to apply existing science and technology to real domain-area complex adaptive systems; in the medium run, jump-start the creation of new science and technology capability through Sandia's Laboratory Directed Research and Development program; and in the long run, inculcate an awareness at the Department of Energy of the importance of supporting complex adaptive systems science through its Office of Science

Multi-level characterization and information extraction in directed and node-labeled functional brain networks

Current research in computational neuroscience puts great emphasis on the computation and analysis of the functional connectivity of the brain. The methodological developments presented in this work are concerned with a group-specific comprehensive analysis of networks that represent functional interaction patterns. Four application studies are presented, in which functional brain network samples of different clinical background were analyzed in different ways, using combinations of established approaches and own methodological developments. Study I is concerned with a sample-specific decomposition of the functional brain networks of depressed subjects and healthy controls into small functionally important and recurring subnetworks (motifs) using own developments. Study II investigates whether lithium treatment effects are reflected in the functional brain networks of HIV-positive subjects with diagnosed cognitive impairment. For it, microscopic and macroscopic structural properties were analyzed. Study III explores spatially highly resolved functional brain networks with regard to a functional segmentation given by identified module (community) structure. Also, ground truth networks with known module structure were generated using own methodological developments. They formed the basis of a comprehensive simulation study that quantified module structure quality and preservation in order to evaluate the effects of a novel approach for the identification of connectivity (lsGCI). Study IV tracks the time-evolution of module structure and introduces a newly developed own approach for the determination of edge weight thresholds based on multicriteria optimization. The methodological challenges that underly these different topological analyses, but also the various opportunities to gain an improved understanding of neural information processing among brain areas were highlighted by this work and the presented results