Title: From complexity science to reliability efficiency: a new way of looking at complex network systems and critical infrastructures

Authors: E. Zio

Addresses: Department of Nuclear Engineering, Polytechnic of Milan, Via Ponzio 34/3, I-20133 Milan, Italy

Abstract: Modern societies are increasingly dependent on the availability, reliability, safety and security of critical infrastructures such as energy, water supply, transportation, information and telecommunication networks. The analysis of such systems seems to require a change towards a holistic framework capturing the properties which emerge from the complexity of the relationships among the system elements. In this paper, the modern view of Complexity Science is embraced to introduce innovative measures of the reliability performance of a network system. These are termed reliability efficiencies and are intended to measure the global and local robustness of the network to faults of its components.

Keywords: complex network systems; critical infrastructures; robustness; vulnerability; complexity science; characteristic path lengths; clustering coefficients; network reliability; reliability efficiency; local reliability; global reliability.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCIS.2007.014122

International Journal of Critical Infrastructures, 2007 Vol.3 No.3/4, pp.488 - 508

Published online: 21 Jun 2007 *

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