We present a model for the dynamic spreading of failures in networked systems. The model combines network nodes as active, bistable elements and delayed interactions along directed links. By means of simulations, we explore the time-dependent spreading and cascade failures in different network...

Swarm intelligence is widely recognized as a powerful paradigm of self-organized optimization, with numerous examples of successful applications in distributed artificial intelligence. However, the role of physical interactions in the organization of traffic flows in ants under crowded...

We discuss models and data of crowd disasters, crime, terrorism, war and disease spreading to show that conventional recipes, such as deterrence strategies, are often not effective and sufficient to contain them. Many common approaches do not provide a good picture of the actual system behavior,...

Cooperation is of utmost importance to society as a whole, but is often challenged by individual self-interests. While game theory has studied this problem extensively, there is little work on interactions within and across groups with different preferences or beliefs. Yet, people from different...

The growth of world population, limitation of resources, economic problems, and environmental issues force engineers to develop increasingly efficient solutions for logistic systems. Pure optimization for efficiency, however, has often led to technical solutions that are vulnerable to variations...

The study of crowd dynamics is interesting because of the various self-organization phenomena resulting from the interactions of many pedestrians, which may improve or obstruct their flow. Besides formation of lanes of uniform walking direction and oscillations at bottlenecks at moderate...

Based on suitable video recordings of interactive pedestrian motion and improved tracking software, we apply an evolutionary optimization algorithm to determine optimal parameter specifications for the social force model. The calibrated model is then used for large-scale pedestrian simulations...