French Roadmap for complex Systems 2008-2009

This second issue of the French Complex Systems Roadmap is the outcome of the Entretiens de Cargese 2008, an interdisciplinary brainstorming session organized over one week in 2008, jointly by RNSC, ISC-PIF and IXXI. It capitalizes on the first roadmap and gathers contributions of more than 70 scientists from major French institutions. The aim of this roadmap is to foster the coordination of the complex systems community on focused topics and questions, as well as to present contributions and challenges in the complex systems sciences and complexity science to the public, political and industrial spheres

Ono: an open platform for social robotics

In recent times, the focal point of research in robotics has shifted from industrial ro- bots toward robots that interact with humans in an intuitive and safe manner. This evolution has resulted in the subfield of social robotics, which pertains to robots that function in a human environment and that can communicate with humans in an int- uitive way, e.g. with facial expressions. Social robots have the potential to impact many different aspects of our lives, but one particularly promising application is the use of robots in therapy, such as the treatment of children with autism. Unfortunately, many of the existing social robots are neither suited for practical use in therapy nor for large scale studies, mainly because they are expensive, one-of-a-kind robots that are hard to modify to suit a specific need. We created Ono, a social robotics platform, to tackle these issues. Ono is composed entirely from off-the-shelf components and cheap materials, and can be built at a local FabLab at the fraction of the cost of other robots. Ono is also entirely open source and the modular design further encourages modification and reuse of parts of the platform

Formally designing and implementing cyber security mechanisms in industrial control networks.

This dissertation describes progress in the state-of-the-art for developing and deploying formally verified cyber security devices in industrial control networks. It begins by detailing the unique struggles that are faced in industrial control networks and why concepts and technologies developed for securing traditional networks might not be appropriate. It uses these unique struggles and examples of contemporary cyber-attacks targeting control systems to argue that progress in securing control systems is best met with formal verification of systems, their specifications, and their security properties. This dissertation then presents a development process and identifies two technologies, TLA+ and seL4, that can be leveraged to produce a high-assurance embedded security device. The method presented in this dissertation takes an informal design of an embedded device that might be found in a control system and 1) formalizes the design within TLA+, 2) creates and mechanically checks a model built from the formal design, and 3) translates the TLA+ design into a component-based architecture of a native seL4 application. The later chapters of this dissertation describe an application of the process to a security preprocessor embedded device that was designed to add security mechanisms to the network communication of an existing control system. The device and its security properties are formally specified in TLA+ in chapter 4, mechanically checked in chapter 5, and finally its native seL4 architecture is implemented in chapter 6. Finally, the conclusions derived from the research are laid out, as well as some possibilities for expanding the presented method in the future

Second Generation General System Theory: Perspectives in Philosophy and Approaches in Complex Systems

Following the classical work of Norbert Wiener, Ross Ashby, Ludwig von Bertalanffy and many others, the concept of System has been elaborated in different disciplinary fields, allowing interdisciplinary approaches in areas such as Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Cognitive Science, Economics, Engineering, Social Sciences, Mathematics, Medicine, Artificial Intelligence, and Philosophy. The new challenge of Complexity and Emergence has made the concept of System even more relevant to the study of problems with high contextuality. This Special Issue focuses on the nature of new problems arising from the study and modelling of complexity, their eventual common aspects, properties and approaches—already partially considered by different disciplines—as well as focusing on new, possibly unitary, theoretical frameworks. This Special Issue aims to introduce fresh impetus into systems research when the possible detection and correction of mistakes require the development of new knowledge. This book contains contributions presenting new approaches and results, problems and proposals. The context is an interdisciplinary framework dealing, in order, with electronic engineering problems; the problem of the observer; transdisciplinarity; problems of organised complexity; theoretical incompleteness; design of digital systems in a user-centred way; reaction networks as a framework for systems modelling; emergence of a stable system in reaction networks; emergence at the fundamental systems level; behavioural realization of memoryless functions

Single- and multi-population kinetic models for vehicular traffic reproducing fundamental diagrams and with low computational complexity.

In this work, we focus on kinetic theory of vehicular traffic. We introduce (Boltzmann and Fokker-Planck) models having the following properties: they are amenable for computations and analytical investigations, but at the same time they are able to characterize and to explain the features of experimental diagrams. The scattering observed in experimental data is reproduced by a multi-population model. We propose a new interpretation of the dispersion of data since it can be attributed to the heterogeneous composition of the flow. In fact, the scattering is obtained by treating traffic as a mixture of vehicles with different physical and kinematic characteristics. The multi-population model is built as generalization of a new single-population model for which the analytical expression of the steady state can be computed explicitly. This is possible thanks to the particular choice of the microscopic interactions. These models are able to catch the macroscopic properties of the flow at equilibrium, as the phase transition, the capacity drop and the scattering of data. The proposed models are endowed with a robust mathematical structure. We study the mathematical properties which induce the structure of diagrams, the well posedness with the existence and uniqueness proof of the solution of the kinetic equations. A further result of this thesis is the analysis of the effects of the microscopic interactions on the macroscopic dynamics. This purely multiscale issue which is tackled by an asymptotic study of the model in the Fokker-Planck limit

Kinetic Theory and Swarming Tools to Modeling Complex Systems—Symmetry problems in the Science of Living Systems

This MPDI book comprises a number of selected contributions to a Special Issue devoted to the modeling and simulation of living systems based on developments in kinetic mathematical tools. The focus is on a fascinating research field which cannot be tackled by the approach of the so-called hard sciences—specifically mathematics—without the invention of new methods in view of a new mathematical theory. The contents proposed by eight contributions witness the growing interest of scientists this field. The first contribution is an editorial paper which presents the motivations for studying the mathematics and physics of living systems within the framework an interdisciplinary approach, where mathematics and physics interact with specific fields of the class of systems object of modeling and simulations. The different contributions refer to economy, collective learning, cell motion, vehicular traffic, crowd dynamics, and social swarms. The key problem towards modeling consists in capturing the complexity features of living systems. All articles refer to large systems of interaction living entities and follow, towards modeling, a common rationale which consists firstly in representing the system by a probability distribution over the microscopic state of the said entities, secondly, in deriving a general mathematical structure deemed to provide the conceptual basis for the derivation of models and, finally, in implementing the said structure by models of interactions at the microscopic scale. Therefore, the modeling approach transfers the dynamics at the low scale to collective behaviors. Interactions are modeled by theoretical tools of stochastic game theory. Overall, the interested reader will find, in the contents, a forward look comprising various research perspectives and issues, followed by hints on to tackle these