Managing Complexity

TL;DR

This paper reviews how physical analogs and thermodynamic metaphors can help understand complex adaptive systems and develop stable control strategies, especially in economic and infrastructural contexts.

Contribution

It synthesizes current methods using physical analogs and thermodynamics to analyze and control complex systems, highlighting their potential for robust system management.

Findings

Physical analogs aid understanding of complex systems.

Thermodynamic metaphors reveal global properties of systems.

Control strategies based on these analogs can enhance stability.

Abstract

Physical analogs have shown considerable promise for understanding the behavior of complex adaptive systems, including macroeconomics, biological systems, social networks, and electric power markets. Many of today's most challenging technical and policy questions can be reduced to a distributed economic control problem. Indeed, economically-based control of large-scale systems is founded on the conjecture that the price-based regulation (e.g., auctions, markets) results in an optimal allocation of resources and emergent optimal system control. This paper explores the state of the art in the use physical analogs for understanding the behavior of some econophysical systems and deriving stable and robust control strategies for them. In particular we review and discuss applications of some analytic methods based on a thermodynamic metaphor according to which the interplay between system entropy and conservation laws gives rise to intuitive and governing global properties of complex systems that cannot be otherwise understood.