ESD Seminar Series

The Topology and Dynamics of Complex Man-Made Networks

By Professor Dan Braha, New England Complex Systems Institute, Cambridge MA, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth MA

Abstract
In recent years, understanding the structure and function of complex networks has become the foundation for explaining many different real-world complex biological, technological and informal social phenomena. Techniques from statistical physics have been successfully applied to the analysis of these networks, and have uncovered surprising statistical structural properties that have also been shown to have a major effect on their functionality, dynamics, robustness, and fragility. This paper examines, for the first time, the statistical properties of several man-made networks and discusses their significance. We show that the structure of information flow networks that are at the heart of many man-made systems have properties that are similar to those displayed by other social, biological and technological networks. In this context, we identify novel properties that may be characteristic of other information-carrying networks. We further present a detailed model and analysis of a prototypical network dynamics on complex networks, and show how the underlying network topologies provide direct information about the characteristics of this dynamics. We believe that our new analysis methodology and empirical results are also relevant to other information-carrying networks.