The Complexity Blog

External projects, internal projects, publishing papers, submitting proposals- This multi-tasking ability is part of the reason why Innaxis never finds a dull moment.  Even in the downtime that often occurs in European countries during the summer months, Innaxis has published two documents related to Complexity Science.

This multi-tasking achievement was deemed capable through the efforts of Massimiliano Zanin, Lucas Lacasa, and Miguel Cea. They have written ¨Dynamics in Scheduled Networks¨ which has been published in the interdisciplinary journal Chaos (http://chaos.aip.org). Chaos is a quarterly journal published by the American Institute of Physics devoted to increasing the understanding of nonlinear phenomena and describing the manifestations in a manner comprehensible to researchers from a broad spectrum of disciplines.

The paper will be published in the June 2009 edition and is already available online (Chaos-an Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science website). The paper explains how time restrictions are usually neglected when studying real or virtual systems through complex network theories, and a static structure is normally defined to characterize which node is connected to another. This approach seems to be oversimplified as real networks are indeed dynamically modified by external mechanisms.  The paper presents a scheduled network formalism that takes into account such dynamical modifications by including generic time restrictions in the structure.  Below is a paragraph taken from the paper explaining how scheduled networks can be used in an air traffic management scenario.

The same team of people along with Samuel Cristobal has also published a contribution titled, ¨A Dynamical Model for the Air Transportation Network¨ which has been submitted and approved for  European Conference on Modelling and Simulation ’09. The publication will be discussed at the June 9-12 event in Madrid Spain under the category ¨Discrete Event Modelling and Simulation in Logistics, Transport and Supply Chains (LT) (http://www.scs-europe.net/conf/ecms2009/index.html).

In this contribution, Scheduled Networks are used as a framework for simulating the growth of virtual aeronautical networks. The basic assumption is that the cost for passengers should be minimized, which is approximated with the time needed to go from one airport to another one. Some results are presented, and the role and importance of hubs (that is, central airports where great part of the flights are concentrated) is discussed. Peer reviewing for both publications was done by F J Mancebo, founder of the Innaxis Foundation & Research Institute and longtime UPM (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid) mathematics professor in the Superior School of Aeronautics.

The papers recently published by the Innaxis group have further advanced the opportunities to expand the findings into different scenarios. Following the same direction, Innaxis will be launching ComplexWorld.eu, an initiative to foster and promote the study of system complexity in the field of air transport. More particularly, ComplexWord.eu will be a candidate network for the SESAR Long Term initiative (WP E). As Air Transport Networks are becoming more complex characterized by an increasing number of airspace users which inevitably brings indeterminacy and unpredictability to the behavior of the system that needs to be carefully studied, analyzed, modeled, simulated and understood. Although still in it´s preliminary phase, ComplexWorld.eu will promote a research plan on how to tackle these issues in the field of air traffic management, introducing the concept of complexity management in the context of the 4D Trajectory Management operational concept developed in SESAR.