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Abstracts

D. Alexander

Integrated Emergency Response: A Resilience Perspective

This paper considers the problem of how to integrate the diverse components of emergency rescue and management services into a coherent civil protection service. Recently, the term "resilience" has gained much currency and has begun to assume the trappings of a philosophy of emergency preparedness. First, the paper reviews the meaning of resilience and its guiding principles. Secondly, models are presented that seek to interpret the complexity of the organisation of civil protection and reduce it to manageable proportions. The models deal with functional, geographical and administrative divisions, with support functions and command functions, and with parallel civil protection and civil defence activities. Attention is focused on the impact of the information and communications technology revolution on the management of civilian emergencies. One of the effects has been to flatten the chain of command and redirect the participating forces towards new forms of collaboration that are less hierarchical than in the past. Thirdly, the paper considers the role of education and training in creating the conditions for resiliency. Finally, it tackles the question of how to create a sustainable civil protection system. Sustainability requires the support of the beneficiaries of civil protection and the integration of services into the normal, workaday management of community functions. In conclusion, resilience is intimately linked to adaptability and flexibility in emergency management, which require that close attention be devoted to the design and integration of services.



M. Marsili

Volatility and the emergence of socio-economic networks

The very notion of networks in socio-economic systems relies on the fact that both the agents composing it and their relationships are stable to some degree. In reality both change in time as a result of a large variety of (often unobservable) factors -- which we call volatility. For a given type of socio-economic interaction among agents, dense networks can exist only if volatility is not strong enough. We show, in simple stylized models of evolving networks, that the transition to a dense network is sharp and discontinuous when volatility affects mainly the links, whereas it turns continuous when volatility affects mostly nodes (high agents' turnover). References: [1] http://arxiv.org/abs/0807.0348 [2] http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0604036



J. Portugali

Extreme events in complex urban systems: Theoretical, methodological and practical challenges

The issue of extreme events (ExEv) are currently capturing the center of public discourse. One of the reasons for this is urbanization: The last century has witnessed the fastest demographic and urban growth in human history: for the first time more than 50% of the world population lives in cities. As a result, cities are becoming the places most vulnerable to ExEv of all kinds and the effect of ExEv on urban areas is becoming more disastrous than ever (the tsunami in South-East Asia, September 11, in N.Y, hurricane Katrina in New Orleans etc.). There are several interrelated challenges in this new reality among them, firstly, the challenge of developing a theoretical framework for the study of ExEv in cities. Secondly, the challenge of developing simulation models. Thirdly, the challenge of developing practical technologies that apply the theory and methodology to the state-of-the-art technologies. In this talk I'll examine complexity theory as a theoretical framework for ExEv, its corresponding simulation models as urban simulation models and a configuration of USM, GIS and VR as decision and planning support systems



V. Latora

The multiple centrality assessment

We present a new method, named Multiple Centrality Assessment (MCA), for mapping centrality in urban networks. MCA makes it possible to ascertain how each street is structurally central in a city according to several different notions of centrality (namely closeness, betweenness, straightness and information), as well as different scales of being central. Spatial distributions of centrality allow an extended comprehension of the city structure, nicely capturing the skeleton of most central routes and sub-areas, and are able to characterize different classes of cities, such as planned cities and self-organized cities. We also investigate how much higher street centrality statistically determines a higher presence of activities (shops and services). Results offer evidence-based foundations of a high level of correlation between the centrality of streets, especially betweenness centrality, and several other urban dynamics like traffic flows and the location of shops and services as well as that of workplaces. These results support the predictive capability of the MCA model as a tool for sustainable urban design. We finally discuss a professional application of the MCA to the restoration of the network of paths and open spaces in the Parma (IT) University Campus.



S. Hallerberg (Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems) and H. Kantz

Influence of the event magnitude on the predictability of an extreme event

We investigate the predictability of extreme events in time series. The focus of this work is to understand under which circumstances large events are better predictable than smaller events. Therefore we use a simple prediction algorithm based on precursory structures which are identified using the maximum likelihood principle. Using the receiver operator characteristic curve as a measure for the quality of predictions we find that the dependence on the event size is closely linked to the probability distribution function of the underlying stochastic process. We evaluate this dependence on the probability distribution function analytically and numerically. If we assume that the optimal precursory structures are used to make the predictions, we find that large increments are better predictable if the underlying stochastic process has a Gaussian probability distribution function, whereas larger increments are harder to predict if the underlying probability distribution function has a power-law tail. In the case of an exponential distribution function we find no significant dependence on the event size. Furthermore we compare these results with predictions of increments in correlated data, namely, velocity increments of a free jet flow. The velocity increments in the free jet flow are in dependence on the time scale either asymptotically Gaussian or asymptotically exponential distributed. The numerical results for predictions within free jet data are in good agreement with the previous analytical considerations for random numbers.



M. Galeotti, A. Antoci (University of Sassari)

Innovative financial instruments for environmental protection

We present two simplified models of financial activities aimed at implementing and supporting environmental protection policies. These innovative financial instruments should be issued with assistance of the Public Administration (PA), but mainly fuelled by the interest of certain economic agents: in one case, visitors and firms operating in a tourist region R; in the other case, citizens and visitors utilizing activities and services in the center of a city C (briefly, City users). The complex strategic interactions among the economic agents and among them and the PA are modeled through a game theoretic approach and their dynamics are (partially) analyzed.



P. Lio'

How can we respond quickly to urban challenges such as epidemics and communications breakdown?

This talk is divided in two sections aiming at investigating appropriate responses to epidemiogical and communications breakage challenges and at stressing the relevant open problems. First, using actual census, family and age structure, land-use and population-mobility data, we describe a stochastic cellular automata on a social contact network to study the propagation of infuenza epidemics in the UK. We considered large city and country village cases as examples of different mobility and density. In particular, we address age dependency and obtain the contact networks through the analysis of location co-presence. We analyze infection propensities as well as vaccination techniques. The results indicate the relative merits of different vaccination strategies combined with early detection without resorting to mass vaccination of a population. Recent data and model on avian flu will also be shown. In the second part, we describe our recent work on modeling mobility with particular focus on directional antennas and on trace analysis. The use of directional antennas is receiving lot of attention due to their low radio leakage and lower power consumption and at the same time providing high throughput. These characteristics become very important during communication emergencies. Finally trace analysis provides invaluable insights into actual mobility patterns and communication network users. Data from various sources will be presented.