User:J. C. Martinez-Garcia/Notebook/HMS Activities/2008/10/01

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Efficiency in networks

Today i continue with my study on efficiency in networks. the idea is the following one:

The Science-Innovation relation is a network based one. I see the following components of the network:

  1. Producers, i.e. scientist.
  2. Consumers, i.e. everybody consuming the products of science.
  3. The producers are nodes interconnected by different kinds of edges (papers, citations).
  4. The consumers provides resources to the producers and in exchange they obtain:
    1. Technological solutions to given problems.
    2. Human resources.
    3. Symbolic products (pride, knowledge, hope, etcetera).
  5. producers can be consumers, but consumers can not be producers.
  6. The purpose of the network is to provide to the consumers the products of sciences. Assuming that a product is the result of the network, the efficiency of the network can be measured in terms of satisfaction coming from the consumers, which can then be translated in terms of resources provided to the scientist.
  7. The efficiency measurement must consider available resources, satisfaction, etcetera.
  8. For a satisfactory efficiency system, the network must be in equilibrium, i.e. teh adition of new components -links or nodes- to the network may produce reduction of the efficiency.

To tackle all this issues the idea is to study the paper:

  1. A network efficiency measure with application to critical infrastructure networks by A. Nagurney and Q. Qiang (2008). J Glob Optim 40:261-275. The paper is here: Media:network_efficiency.pdf.
  2. On a Paradox of Traffic Planning by D. Braess et al (2005). Transportation Science, Vol. 39, No. 4, pp. 446-450. the paper is here: Media:braess.pdf.

The first is important, since it gives a measure for the efficiency of the network which seems to be appropriated for my purpose. The conjecture is that Science is an network out of equilibrium, which is now suffering from the Braess paradox phenomenon. Perhaps I will contact the people from the University of Massachusetts in Amherts(http://supernet.som.umass.edu/), who seems to be very implied in this kind of research (this only true if the networks is conceived to solve an user-optimization problem).


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