PATRES: Pattern Resilience
In February 2007, CRESS joined a new project, PATRES, funded by the European Commission to develop new methods and tools for defining action policies in order to maintain or restore desired pattern dynamics in a complex system. Our role in this project is mainly concerned with a case study about social networking sites on the Internet, such as Facebook and Flickr.
PATRES is a project supported by the New and Emerging Science and Technology programme of the sixth Framework Programme of the European Commission. It started on 1st February 2007 and continues for three years.
The project objectives are:
- to develop new methods and tools for defining synthetic (i.e. in low dimensions) descriptions of complex dynamics, based on robust pattern dynamics,
- to develop new methods and tools for defining action policies in order to maintain or restore desired pattern dynamics in a complex system,
- to test and illustrate these innovations on a set of case studies.
The project will develop methods and prototype software tools for modelling and managing pattern resilience in complex systems. Pattern resilience is understood as the capacity of the system to maintain or to recover some desired pattern dynamics (which are related to useful functions) in a changing environment. The pattern dynamics are evolving statistical regularities which are generated by the interconnected components of the system. We shall build on statistical physics and Pattern Oriented Modelling techniques to develop a set of robust techniques to express such pattern dynamics in state spaces of relatively small dimensionality. Viability theory will provide a framework for an inclusive, rigorous and practical definition of resilience, which give possibilities to find sets of actions to maintain or restore the satisfactory pattern dynamics in a system.
Our contributions are case studies on innovation networks in biotechnology, and on "Web 2.0" sites such as Wikipedia and Flickr.
