Participants: BIU, ISI.
Objectives:
Developing the theoretical understanding and computational tools to contend with realistic socio-economic and biological modeling. Adaptation of autocatalytic fluctuations to "noisy" environment is common to all the performed researches, but we need also to adapt the model to any particular problem. Currently, the forecasted projects include:
Decaying catalysts: where the lifetime of a fluctuation in the catalyst concentration is limited by the reactant concentration (i.e., the catalysts are "consumed" by the reactants). This is the general situation in ecological (predator-prey) and economic systems, where some sort of "back reaction" always exists.
Finite carrying capacity: is also common in any realistic system. This property implies severe restrictions on the possible role of rare events (the local response of the system is limited), therefore the robustness features of the "emerging" phase are much more pronounced in this case.
Global effects: are to be considered, since the interactions in bio-socio-econo systems are usually long range, and instead of local interactions one should consider interactions on the appropriate (e.g., Infinite range, Erdos-Renyi or scale-free) net.
Description of work:
Extensions of the AB model may be discussed both analytically and using computer simulations. As in any research that is trying to bridge between theory and experiment in complex system, the best strategy is to take the realistic problem, to extract from it a very simple theory (with only few parameters) that capture only the main effect and can be solved analytically, and then to fit back a modified version of this model to the experimental results.
Deliverable:
D1.1 The deliverables of this workpackage are, according to the above description, threefold: models, methodology and numerical tools that will serve the other workpackges of this research plan. The theoretical results will delivered such as to describe the concrete systems under study and to suggest new experiments / measurements in the concrete applications. Months 0-48.
Milestones:
Except of the modeling for other participants (with their own milestones) the "internal" milestones of this workpackege are:
1. Decaying catalysts, month 12;
2. Finite carrying capacity, month 24;
3. Global interactions: month 36;
4. Nonlinear effects: month 48.