Special Issue "Complex Systems"

Guest Editor
Prof. Dr. Stefan Thurner
Medical University of Vienna, Spitalgasse 23, 1090 Vienna, Austria
Website: http://www.complex-systems.meduniwien.ac.at/people/sthurner/
E-Mail: stefan.thurner@meduniwien.ac.at
Interests: statistical mechanics of complex systems; theory of evolutionary processes; entropy formulations; network theory; scaling theory; annomalous diffusion

Dear Colleagues,

Complex Systems, when seen as statistical systems of strongly interacting components, are far from being understood on a fundamental level. These systems cover an immense range of important phenomena in the natural-, life- and social sciences. In many of these fields an incremental understanding of underlying principles would mean significant progress. The role of statistical mechanics in understanding Complex Systems is fundamental, in particular one has to understand to what extend thermodynamical descriptions are sensible for specific systems, and where new paths have to be taken to achieve reasonable ways to manage the typically large numbers of variables and parameters. The role of entropy has to be understood for non-ergodic Complex Systems, and new ways to practically characterize high dimensional phase diagrams have to be explored. Big progress has been made in network theory, one of the fundamental building blocks of strongly interacting systems, however a new generation of problems lies ahead: the understanding of mutual influences of different networks linking the same set of nodes (multiplex networks), or the understanding of networks of networks. The purpose of this special issue is to try to localize the status quo of the statistical mechanical understanding of Complex Systems and its applications, and to sketch innovative paths into the future, both in fundamental understanding and applications.

Specific topics of interest include:

• entropies of non-ergodic systems
• statistical mechanics of networks
• multiplex networks
• collective dynamics
• evolutionary dynamics
• generalized statistics - superstatistics
• multiscale-analysis
• non-ergodic systems
• applications and agent based models

Submission

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