Complexity aided design: The FuturICT technological innovation paradigm

"In the next century, planet earth will don an electronic skin. It will use the Internet as a scaffold to support and transmit its sensations. This skin is already being stitched together. It consists of millions of embedded electronic measuring devices: thermostats, pressure gauges, pollution detectors, cameras, microphones, glucose sensors, EKGs, electroencephalographs. These will probe and monitor cities and endangered species, the atmosphere, our ships, highways and fleets of trucks, our conversations, our bodies-even our dreams ....What will the earth's new skin permit us to feel? How will we use its surges of sensation? For several years-maybe for a decade-there will be no central nervous system to manage this vast signaling network. Certainly there will be no central intelligence...some qualities of self-awareness will emerge once the Net is sensually enhanced. Sensuality is only one force pushing the Net toward intelligence”. These statements are quoted by an interview by Cherry Murray, Dean of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Professor of Physics. It is interesting to outline the timeliness and highly predicting power of these statements. In particular, we would like to point to the relevance of the question "What will the earth's new skin permit us to feel?” to the work we are going to discuss in this paper. There are many additional compelling questions, as for example: "How can the electronic earth's skin be made more resilient?”; "How can the earth's electronic skin be improved to better satisfy the need of our society?”;"What can the science of complex systems contribute to this endeavour?” Graphical abstrac

The emerging energy web

There is a general need of elaborating energy-effective solutions for managing our increasingly dense interconnected world. The problem should be tackled in multiple dimensions -technology, society, economics, law, regulations, and politics- at different temporal and spatial scales. Holistic approaches will enable technological solutions to be supported by socio-economic motivations, adequate incentive regulation to foster investment in green infrastructures coherently integrated with adequate energy provisioning schemes. In this article, an attempt is made to describe such multidisciplinary challenges with a coherent set of solutions to be identified to significantly impact the way our interconnected energy world is designed and operated. Graphical abstrac

Confluence reduction for Markov automata

Markov automata are a novel formalism for specifying systems exhibiting nondeterminism, probabilistic choices and Markovian rates. Recently, the process algebra MAPA was introduced to efficiently model such systems. As always, the state space explosion threatens the analysability of the models generated by such specifications. We therefore introduce confluence reduction for Markov automata, a powerful reduction technique to keep these models small. We define the notion of confluence directly on Markov automata, and discuss how to syntactically detect confluence on the MAPA language as well. That way, Markov automata generated by MAPA specifications can be reduced on-the-fly while preserving divergence-sensitive branching bisimulation. Three case studies demonstrate the significance of our approach, with reductions in analysis time up to an order of magnitude

Mitochondrial DNA diversity of five Italian autochtonous donkey breeds

AbstractTo investigate the mitochondrial DNA diversity of five Italian donkey breeds (Amiata, Martinafranca, Romagnolo, Asinara, and Ragusano), we sequenced the HVR I region (D-loop, 288 bp) and cytochrome b gene (274 bp) in 121 individuals. In the D-loop we found nineteen mutations corresponding to fourteen different haplotypes, while in cyt b coding gene only six mutations were found, originating five different haplotypes. In particular, three mutations out of six were non-synonymous, causing an aminoacidic substitution. About the D-loop region, the value of nucleotide diversity (π) observed within breeds was relatively low, but not far from values detected in other European breeds. Phylogenetic and network analyses disclosed the presence of two divergent maternal lineages within Italian donkeys. These haplogroups correspond to the well known lineages of ancestors (Equus asinus somaliensis and E. a. africanus), as donkeys were domesticated from distinct wild subspecies living in Eastern Africa regions. ..

Symbolic Analysis of Timed Petri Nets

In timed Petri nets temporal properties are associated with transitions as transition firing times (or occurrence times). Specific properties of timed nets, such as boundedness or absence of deadlocks, can depend upon temporal properties and sometimes even a small change of these properties has a significant effect on the net’s behavior (e.g., a bounded net becomes unbounded or vice versa). The objective of symbolic analysis of timed nets is to provide information about the net’s behavior which is independent of specific temporal properties, i.e., which describes preperties of the whole class of timed nets with the same structure