Bücher der Reihe Understanding Complex Systems

This proceedings volume contains talks and poster presentations from the International Symposium "Self-Organization in Complex Systems: The Past, Present, and Future of Synergetics", which took place at Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg, an Institute of Advanced Studies, in Delmenhorst, Germany, during the period November 13 - 16, 2012.

This edited volume presents chapters on the dynamics of global climate change and global warming in the Middle East. The audience for this volume includes policy makers, researchers, and students unified by the common goal of making better decisions in the sustainable production and consumption of energy.

It provides a unified view of nonlinear properties in many different systems and highlights many new developments.While volume 1 concentrates on mathematical theory and computational techniques and challenges, which are essential for the study of nonlinear science, this second volume deals with nonlinear excitations in several fields.

This book presents collaborative research presented by experts in the field of nonlinear science provides the reader with contemporary, cutting-edge, research works that bridge the gap between theory and device realizations of nonlinear phenomena.

This book gives the definitive mathematical answer to what thermodynamics really is: a variational calculus applied to probability distributions. Extending Gibbs's notion of ensemble, the Author imagines the ensemble of all possible probability distributions and assigns probabilities to them by selection rules that are fairly general. The calculus of the most probable distribution in the ensemble produces the entire network of mathematical relationships we recognize as thermodynamics. The first part of the book develops the theory for discrete and continuous distributions while the second part applies this thermodynamic calculus to problems in population balance theory and shows how the emergence of a giant component in aggregation, and the shattering transition in fragmentation may be treated as formal phase transitions.While the book is intended as a research monograph, the material is self-contained and the style sufficiently tutorial to be accessible for self-paced study by an advanced graduate student in such fields as physics, chemistry, and engineering.

With an emphasis on exploring measurable aspects of ancient narratives, Maths Meets Myths sets out to investigate age-old material with new techniques. This book collects, for the first time, novel quantitative approaches to studying sources from the past, such as chronicles, epics, folktales, and myths. It contributes significantly to recent efforts in bringing together natural scientists and humanities scholars in investigations aimed at achieving greater understanding of our cultural inheritance.Accordingly, each contribution reports on a modern quantitative approach applicable to narrative sources from the past, or describes those which would be amenable to such treatment and why they are important.This volume is a unique state-of-the-art compendium on an emerging research field which also addresses anyone with interests in quantitative approaches to humanities.

After a short introduction to the fundamentals, this book provides a detailed account of major advances in applying fractional calculus to dynamical systems. Fractional order dynamical systems currently continue to gain further importance in many areas of science and engineering.As with many other approaches to mathematical modeling, the first issue to be addressed is the need to couple a definition of the fractional differentiation or integration operator with the types of dynamical systems that are analyzed. As such, for the fundamentals the focus is on basic aspects of fractional calculus, in particular stability analysis, which is required to tackle synchronization in coupled fractional order systems, to understand the essence of estimators for related integer order systems, and to keep track of the interplay between synchronization and parameter observation. This serves as the common basis for the more advanced topics and applications presented in the subsequent chapters, which include an introduction to the 'Immersion and Invariance' (I&I) methodology, the masterslave synchronization scheme for partially known nonlinear fractional order systems, Fractional Algebraic Observability (FAO) and Fractional Generalized quasi-Synchronization (FGqS) to name but a few.This book is intended not only for applied mathematicians and theoretical physicists, but also for anyone in applied science dealing with complex nonlinear systems.

In this book international expert authors provide solutions for modern fundamental problems including the complexity of computing of critical points for set-valued mappings, the behaviour of solutions of ordinary differential equations, partial differential equations and difference equations, or the development of an abstract theory of global attractors for multi-valued impulsive dynamical systems. These abstract mathematical approaches are applied to problem-solving in solid mechanics, hydro- and aerodynamics, optimization, decision making theory and control theory. This volume is therefore relevant to mathematicians as well as engineers working at the interface of these fields.

This book deals with artificial intelligence (AI) and its several applications. It is not an organic text that should be read from the first page onwards, but rather a collection of articles that can be read at will (or at need). The idea of this work is indeed to provide some food for thoughts on how AI is impacting few verticals (insurance and financial services), affecting horizontal and technical applications (speech recognition and blockchain), and changing organizational structures (introducing new figures or dealing with ethical issues).The structure of the chapter is very similar, so I hope the reader won't find difficulties in establishing comparisons or understanding the differences between specific problems AI is being used for. The first chapter of the book is indeed showing the potential and the achievements of new AI techniques in the speech recognition domain, touching upon the topics of bots and conversational interfaces. The second and thirds chapter tackle instead verticals that are historically data-intensive but not data-driven, i.e., the financial sector and the insurance one. The following part of the book is the more technical one (and probably the most innovative), because looks at AI and its intersection with another exponential technology, namely the blockchain. Finally, the last chapters are instead more operative, because they concern new figures to be hired regardless of the organization or the sector, and ethical and moral issues related to the creation and implementation of new type of algorithms.

This book describes the ontology structure, types of actors, their potential actions, and ways that actions can affect the things that are part of the conflict. An ontology of unconventional conflict supports the understanding of unconventional conflict in general.

It provides a unified view of nonlinear properties in many different systems and highlights many new developments.While volume 1 concentrates on mathematical theory and computational techniques and challenges, which are essential for the study of nonlinear science, this second volume deals with nonlinear excitations in several fields.

In particular, a general model for studying time evolution of transition networks, deflection routing in complex networks, recommender systems for social networks analysis and mining, strategy selection in networked evolutionary games, integration and methods in computational biology, are discussed in detail.

What makes this "social" is that it can represent an observed society.Social systems include all those systems where the components have individual agency but also interact with each other.

This book is part of a two volume set which presents the analysis of nonlinear phenomena as a long-standing challenge for research in basic and applied science as well as engineering.

The overall aim of this book, an outcome of the European FP7 FET Open NESS project, is to contribute to the ongoing effort to put the quantitative social sciences on a proper footing for the 21st century. A key focus is economics, and its implications on policy making, where the still dominant traditional approach increasingly struggles to capture the economic realities we observe in the world today - with vested interests getting too often in the way of real advances.Insights into behavioral economics and modern computing techniques have made possible both the integration of larger information sets and the exploration of disequilibrium behavior. The domain-based chapters of this work illustrate how economic theory is the only branch of social sciences which still holds to its old paradigm of an equilibrium science - an assumption that has already been relaxed in all related fields of research in the light of recent advances in complex and dynamical systems theory and relateddata mining.The other chapters give various takes on policy and decision making in this context. Written in nontechnical style throughout, with a mix of tutorial and essay-like contributions, this book will benefit all researchers, scientists, professionals and practitioners interested in learning about the 'thinking in complexity' to understand how socio-economic systems really work.

In particular, a general model for studying time evolution of transition networks, deflection routing in complex networks, recommender systems for social networks analysis and mining, strategy selection in networked evolutionary games, integration and methods in computational biology, are discussed in detail.

In this book, experts from biology, physics and the social sciences examine the unification of all design phenomena in nature and apply this knowledge to designs in engineering, such as vascularization for self-healing and self-cooling materials for aircraft.

Topics that are treated include: interactive continuation tools, higher-dimensional continuation, the computation of invariant manifolds, and continuation techniques for slow-fast systems, for symmetric Hamiltonian systems, for spatially extended systems and for systems with delay.

Our contemporary understanding of brain function is deeply rooted in the ideas of the nonlinear dynamics of distributed networks. The second part introduces the currently available non-invasive technologies for measuring structural and functional connectivity in the brain.

This book provides the state-of-the art of the present understanding of avalanche phenomena in both functional materials and geophysics.

The present work investigates global politics and political implications of social science and management with the aid of the latest complexity and chaos theories. The authors provide the reader a detailed analysis on politics and its associated applications with the help of chaos theory, in a single edited volume.

Analysis of information transfer has found rapid adoption in neuroscience, where a highly dynamic transfer of information continuously runs on top of the brain's slowly-changing anatomical connectivity.

The Second Law, a cornerstone of thermodynamics, governs the average direction of dissipative, non-equilibrium processes.

Bringing together experts in spatial planning, ecology, urban geography, organizational cybernetics and stochastic optimization with specialists in urban analysis systems and methodologies, this book explores multidisciplinary approaches to urban modeling.

Gathering lectures by experts in nonlinear science, this book covers chaos gates, social networks, communication, sensors, lasers, molecular motors, biomedical anomalies, stochastic resonance, nano-oscillators for generating microwave signals and more.

The present work is meant as a reference to provide an organic and comprehensive view of the most relevant results in the exciting new field of Networks of Networks (NetoNets). From those seminal works, the awareness on the importance understanding Networks of Networks (NetoNets) has spread to the entire community of Complexity Science.

This text introduces SKIN (Simulation Knowledge Dynamics in Innovation Networks), an agent-based simulation model that primarily focuses on joint knowledge creation and exchange of knowledge in innovation co-operations and networks.

Using the O.D.D. (Overview, Design concepts, Detail) protocol, this title explores the role of agent-based modeling in predicting the feasibility of various approaches to sustainability. The chapters incorporated in this volume consist of real case studies to illustrate the utility of agent-based modeling and complexity theory in discovering a path to more efficient and sustainable lifestyles. The topics covered within include: households' attitudes toward recycling, designing decision trees for representing sustainable behaviors, negotiation-based parking allocation, auction-based traffic signal control, and others.This selection of papers will be of interest to social scientists who wish to learn more about agent-based modeling as well as experts in the field of agent-based modeling.

The analysis of recurrences in dynamical systems by using recurrence plots and their quantification is still an emerging field.