Saving Human Lives: What Complexity Science and Information Systems can Contribute

By Dirk Helbing, Dirk Brockmann, Thomas Chadefaux, Karsten Donnay, Ulf Blanke, Olivia Woolley-Meza, Mehdi Moussaïd, Anders Johansson, Jens Krause, Sebastian Schutte and 1 more. Journal of statistical physics, 2014

588 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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, because they neglect feedback loops, instabilities and cascade effects. The complex and often counter-intuitive behavior of social systems and their macro-level collective dynamics can be better understood by means of complexity science. We highlight that a suitable system design and management can help to stop undesirable cascade effects and to enable favorable kinds of self-organization in the system. In such a way, complexity science can help to save human lives.

Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6012fd57d88bd48931af6655afea25c34d7445ba

Citations in the corpus

• Statistical physics of human cooperation (2017, unknown): “In this, we can connect to existing interdisciplinary applications of statistical physics, for example to better understand the economy [288–294], to mitigate crime [18], to promote vaccination [20], to predict and prevent epidemics [19], and to save lives [295], but we also need help from outside o”