Network resilience

TL;DR

This paper reviews the concept of resilience in complex networked systems across various domains, emphasizing recent advances in empirical, experimental, and theoretical approaches to understanding regime shifts and early warning signals.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of resilience functions and regime shifts in complex systems, integrating recent network theory developments and real-world data analysis.

Findings

Resilience functions vary across ecological, social, and infrastructure networks.

Early warning indicators can predict regime shifts in complex systems.

Network interactions are crucial for understanding system resilience.

Abstract

Many systems on our planet are known to shift abruptly and irreversibly from one state to another when they are forced across a "tipping point," such as mass extinctions in ecological networks, cascading failures in infrastructure systems, and social convention changes in human and animal networks. Such a regime shift demonstrates a system's resilience that characterizes the ability of a system to adjust its activity to retain its basic functionality in the face of internal disturbances or external environmental changes. In the past 50 years, attention was almost exclusively given to low dimensional systems and calibration of their resilience functions and indicators of early warning signals without considerations for the interactions between the components. Only in recent years, taking advantages of the network theory and lavish real data sets, network scientists have directed their interest to the real-world complex networked multidimensional systems and their resilience function and early warning indicators. This report is devoted to a comprehensive review of resilience function and regime shift of complex systems in different domains, such as ecology, biology, social systems and infrastructure. We cover the related research about empirical observations, experimental studies, mathematical modeling, and theoretical analysis. We also discuss some ambiguous definitions, such as robustness, resilience, and stability.