author : Erica Jen

In a world of uncertainty, adversity, and rapid change, it might be thought that failure of natural or designed systems should prove the rule rather than the exception. Yet we are surrounded by phenomena on all scales that we instinctively view as being robust to failure. Such systems may be remarkable for their agile response to dramatically changing circumstances, or for their resilience in the face of internal or external attack, or merely for their survival far exceeding a customary life span.

An eminent group of authors present here fascinating aspects of robustness, including the tension between staying the same and responding to change, opportunities for innovation and vulnerabilities to collapse, effects of interactions among different subsystems, and the role of adaptation and learning. They assess to what extent what we know about robustness can be used to gain a better understanding of biological, ecological, and computational systems.

This is the first work to address robustness as a fundamental design principle of complex systems. For those interested in complexity or interdisciplinary science, robustness is presented here as one of the most intriguing new research areas with important implications across many disciplines.