Systemic Interdependencies

Abstract

The increasing complexification of our society is creating and/or tightening interdependences among all its component systems; it is thus crucial to understand the consequences of such an evolution. We will discuss how such interdependences can lead to systemic risk, i.e., to the emergence of unforeseen behavior that could have not been predicted from the understanding of the single systems. In this chapter we will pose some examples of systemic interdependences and introduce some tools and models that allow to understand their possible consequences in sociotechnical systems; we will then revise some reference literature with particular attention to complex network approaches.