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This book covers new methods of identifying ways to help complex systems recover from perturbations. Examples discussed include bacterial biofilms resisting detachment, savannahs recovering from fire, and Internet social networking sites overcoming vandalism.

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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 and Internet social networking sites overcoming vandalism.
The reader is taken through an introduction to the idea of resilience and viability and shown the mathematical basis of the techniques used to analyse systems. The idea of individual or agent-based modelling of complex systems is introduced and related to analytically tractable approximations of such models. A set of case studies illustrates the use of the techniques in real applications, and the final section describes how one can use new and elaborate software tools for carrying out the necessary calculations.
The book is intended for a general scientific audience of readers from the natural and social sciences, yet requires some mathematics to gain a full understanding of the more theoretical chapters.
It is an essential point of reference for those interested in the practical application of the concepts of resilience and viability

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Preface.- Part I Concepts.- What is Resilience? A Short Introduction.- Defining Resilience Mathematically: From Attractors to Viability.- Part II Case Studies.- Viability and Resilience in the Dynamics of Language Competition.- Viable Web Communities:Two Case Studies.- Computational Savanna Models and Viability Based Resilience.- Viability and Resilience of a Bacterial Biofilm Individual-Based Model.- Part III Tools and Techniques.- Approximating Viability Kernels and Resilience Values with KAVIAR.- Geometric Robustness of Viability Kernels and Resilience Basins.

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From the reviews:
"In this book, a consortium of researchers ... suggested measures to formalize the concept of resilience by following viability theory, which can also be extremely useful to design management policies in different environments. ... To sum up, this book is highly recommended to scientists from a wide range of disciplines dealing with complex agent-based systems, where some of the main issues are the calculation of stability of the non-equilibrium states and the robustness under some disturbances." (Albert Diaz-Guilera, Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, April, 2012)

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