Overview
ENFOLDing: Explaining, modelliNg, and FOrecasting gLobal Dynamics
Most of our science which is used to inform policy makers about future social and economic events has been built for systems that are local rather than global and are assumed to behave in ways that are relatively tractable and thus responsive to policy initiatives. Any examination of the degree to which such policy-making has been successful or even informative yields a very mixed picture with such interventions being only partly effective at best, and positively disruptive at worst.
Complexity theory recognizes this dilemma. In this research programme, we will develop new forms of science which address the most difficult of human problems: those that involve global change where there is no organised constituency and whose agencies are largely regarded as being ineffective. We will argue that global systems tend to be treated in isolation from one another and that the unexpected dynamics that characterises their behaviour is due to their coupling and integration that is all to often ignored. To demonstrate this dynamics and to develop appropriate policy responses, we will study four related global systems: trade, migration, security (which includes crime, terrorism and military disputes) and development aid, which tends to be determined as a consequence of these three individual systems. The idea that this dynamics results from coupling suggests that to get a clear view of their dynamics and a better understanding of global change, we need to develop integrated and coupled models whose dynamics can be described in the conventional and perhaps not so conventional language of complexity theory: chaos, turbulence, bifurcations, catastrophes, and phase transition.
We will develop three related styles of model: spatial interaction models embedded in predator-prey like frameworks which generate bifurcations in system behaviour, reaction diffusion models that link location to flow, and network models in which epidemic-like diffusion processes can be used to explain how events cascade into one another. We will apply spatial interaction models to trade and migration, reaction diffusion to military disputes and terrorism, and network models to international crime. We will extend these models to incorporate the generation of qualitative new events such as the emergence of new entities e.g. countries, coupling them together in diverse ways. We will ultimately develop a generic framework for a coupled global dynamics that spans many spatial and temporal scales and pertains to different systems whose behaviours can be simulated both quantitatively and qualitatively.
People
Alan
Wilson
Principal Investigator, CASA
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Michael Batty
Co-Investigator, CASA
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Peter Baudains
Research Associate, Security and Crime Science
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Steven Bishop
Co-Investigator, Maths
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Alex Braithwaite
Co-Investigator, Political Science
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Simone Caschili
Research Associate, CASA
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Adam Dennett
Research Associate, CASA
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Sean Hanna
Co-Investigator, Bartlett School of Graduate Studies
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Hannah Fry
Research Associate, Maths
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Shane Johnson
Co-Investigator, Security and Crime Science
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Elio Marchione
Research Associate, Security and Crime Science
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Pablo Mateos
Co-Investigator, Geography
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Francesca Medda
Co-Investigator, Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering
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Frank Smith
Co-Investigator, Maths
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Doctoral research students on the ENFOLD-ing project are:
Janina Beiser - Political Science
Kimberley Claydon - Geography
Luca Coconchelli - Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering
Thomas Evans - Maths
Outputs
This is a new project that has only just started and outputs reflect those in our other projects specifically COSMIC and GENeSIS:
Batty, M. (2010) Visualising Space-Time Dynamics in Scaling Systems, Complexity, 16, 2, 51-63.
Wilson, A. G. (2010) A general Richardson-Lotka- Volterra-reaction diffusion model, CASA Working Paper 159
Impact
The academic objectives which include the impacts of this programme are as follows
- To explain flow patterns of trade, migration, security (including terrorism, crime and military disputes) and development aid with respect to rapid and unexpected change which we will articulate using conventional theory associated with catastrophe, bifurcation and related methods of nonlinear analysis.
- To demonstrate that patterns of global change can only be explained when the systems above are linked together, thus developing the idea that rapid and unexpected changes at the global level can only be explained in terms of coupling systems together.
- To illustrate how different modelling styles from the quantitative to the qualitative can be integrated both in individual systems as well as between systems.
- To extend such analysis to consider multi-scale, multi-temporal dynamics associated with different characterisations of trade, migration, security and development aid at the regional, country and city scales and over very different time horizons.
- To develop databases for each of these individual global systems and to calibrate and validate appropriate models of the functioning of such systems before integrating these various data in the quest to explain how coupling these systems provides deeper explanations of global dynamics.
The methodological objectives of this programme are as follows.
- To develop a new mathematics for coupled global dynamics, building on three accepted approaches: spatial interaction models embedded in nonlinear logistic frameworks, reaction-diffusion models which link location and flow, and network models that enable diffusion.
- To link spatial interaction to morphogenesis in the trade and migration systems linking Boltzmann-Lotka-Volterra to Turing models in the style associated with Krugman and Venables, to develop reaction-diffusion models to explain changing patterns of terrorism and military disputes, and to develop network models in which such diffusion is captured as epidemic processes, applied to patterns of crime.
- To extend these models to deal with the emergence of new events or categories, such as countries and cities building on Cederman-Axelrod styles of model, enabling the unexpected dynamics of the global system to be appropriately represented.
- To develop new approaches to calibrating, validating and disseminating such models through visual environments that depend on Web 2.0 technologies.