Given Holling’s definition of resilience in ecology, resilience studies in engineering fields have recently begun to focus on the system’s ability to absorb, adapt, and recover. While traditional system reliability engineering has focused on the design of a system to avoid operational collapse, the more recent study of system resilience has shifted the viewpoint for system reliability and safety from “safe–fail” to “fail–safe”, suggesting a systematic management paradigm to recover from unexpected disturbances. It is found that many natural systems can become stabilized at different levels under the influence of random events, which suggests the existence of different domains of attraction in these systems. In this sense, resilience suggests multiple metastable states in ecology, climate, and biology systems. Meanwhile, for engineering systems including critical infrastructures, it is usually assumed that the system has only one single equilibrium state and will return to this original state after perturbations. Identification of multiple network states suggests the necessity of paradigm shift for the corresponding complex system management. In this talk, I will introduce our recent findings about Reliability & Resilience in urban traffic.
Figure 1: Multiple states in real-time traffic percolation.
Guanwen Zeng, Jianxi Gao, Louis Shekhtman, Shengmin Guo, Weifeng Lv, Jianjun Wu, Hao Liu, Orr Levy, Daqing Li*, Ziyou Gao*, H. Eugene Stanley*, Shlomo Havlin. (2020). "Multiple metastable network states in urban traffic". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117(30), 17528--17534.