Managing catastrophic changes in a collective

TL;DR

This paper investigates how large endogenous changes in a multi-agent system, like the El Farol bar model, can be understood, predicted, and controlled through microscopic dynamics analysis and strategic interventions.

Contribution

It demonstrates how macroscopic catastrophic changes are encoded in microscopic dynamics and proposes methods to prevent them through design and monitoring.

Findings

Large endogenous changes are encoded in microscopic dynamics.

Pre-design and monitoring can prevent catastrophic collective changes.

Strategies like 'vaccinations' can control system stability.

Abstract

We address the important practical issue of understanding, predicting and eventually controlling catastrophic endogenous changes in a collective. Such large internal changes arise as macroscopic manifestations of the microscopic dynamics, and their presence can be regarded as one of the defining features of an evolving complex system. We consider the specific case of a multi-agent system related to the El Farol bar model, and show explicitly how the information concerning such large macroscopic changes becomes encoded in the microscopic dynamics. Our findings suggest that these large endogenous changes can be avoided either by pre-design of the collective machinery itself, or in the post-design stage via continual monitoring and occasional `vaccinations'.