Complex Network Systems

Explore the world of coordinated and emergent properties of systems formed by autonomous and independent components that interact. The focus is on graph based models for complex systems. It covers models such as random graphs, scale-free networks, and small worlds. It presents measures and metrics of complexity in graphs. It analyses aspects of phase transition, resilience and robustness, and synchronisation in networks. The second part of the course considers how such graphs can emerge from distributed autonomous systems, in particular, as the result of a design choice, of the creation of a large scale ICT infrastructure or other engineered system. Examples are also drawn from biological and social systems.