Generally, spontaneous pattern formation phenomena are random and repetitive, whereas elaborate devices are the deterministic product of human design.
Yet, biological organisms and collective insect constructions are exceptional examples of complex systems that are both self-organized and architectural.

This book is the first initiative of its kind toward establishing a new field of research, Morphogenetic Engineering, to explore the modeling and implementation of "self-architecturing" systems. Particular emphasis is placed on the programmability and computational abilities of...

Understanding Complex Urban Systems takes as its point of departure the insight that the challenges of global urbanization and the complexity of urban systems cannot be understood - let alone 'managed' - by sectoral and disciplinary approaches alone. But while there has recently been significant progress in broadening and refining the methodologies for the quantitative modeling of complex urban systems, in deepening the theoretical understanding of cities as complex systems, or in illuminating the implications for urban planning, there is still a lack of well-founded conceptual...

The high reliability required in industrial processes has created the necessity of detecting abnormal conditions, called faults, while processes are operating. The term fault generically refers to any type of process degradation, or degradation in equipment performance because of changes in the process's physical characteristics, process inputs or environmental conditions. This book is about the fundamentals of fault detection and diagnosis in a variety of nonlinear systems which are represented by ordinary differential equations. The fault detection problem is approached from a...

One common characteristics of a complex system is its ability to withstand major disturbances and the capacity to rebuild itself. Understanding how such systems demonstrate resilience by absorbing or recovering from major external perturbations requires both quantitative foundations and a multidisciplinary view on the topic.

This book demonstrates how new methods can be used to identify the actions favouring the recovery from perturbations. Examples discussed include bacterial biofilms resisting detachment, grassland savannahs recovering from fire, the dynamics of language competition...

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...

This book introduces and studies a number of stochastic models of subsistence, communication, social evolution and political transition that will allow the reader to grasp the role of uncertainty as a fundamental property of our irreversible world. At the same time, it aims to bring about a more interdisciplinary and quantitative approach across very diverse fields of research in the humanities and social sciences.

Through the examples treated in this work - including anthropology, demography, migration, geopolitics, management, and bioecology, among other things - evidence is...

A collection of different lectures 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.

Representative examples of topics covered include: chaos gates, social networks, communication, sensors, lasers, molecular motors, biomedical anomalies, stochastic resonance, nano-oscillators for generating microwave signals and related complex systems. A common theme among these and many other related lectures is to model, study, understand, and...