凝聚度--描述与测度社会生态系统抗干扰能力的一种新特性

Consilience degree—a new network property to evaluate system's performance against disturbances

研究一个网络系统抵抗干扰的能力,系统科学里有"鲁棒性"的概念,社会—生态系统里用"脆弱性"、"恢复性"和"适应性"等概念.这些已有的概念是否已经全面地描述了系统抵抗干扰的能力呢?在综合灾害风险管理的实践中,整个社会凝心聚力,行动协调一致,往往发挥着至关重要的决定性作用.然而,现有学术研究中所用到的各种系统属性,都不能很好表述一个系统凝心聚力的能力或水平.鉴于此,本文提出一种全新的网络系统属性:网络凝聚度(consilience degree),专门用以度量一个如社会—生态系统一样行为的网络系统凝心聚力,行动协调一致,以抵抗干扰的能力.网络凝聚度实际上是一种更具普遍意义的"联结度".它可以象联结度一样,派生发展出一系列的系统新属性和网络新模型,从而形成一个研究复杂系统的新的理论体系.本文将重点阐述这个体系的雏型.理论分析和仿真研究都证明:本文所提出的网络凝聚度是现有各种系统属性所无法涵盖或替代的,是研究现实复杂系统所必需的新理论工具.

To study the performance of a system against disturbances, many important concepts have been developed, such as ＂robustness＂ in systems science, and ＂vulnerability＂, ＂resilience＂ and ＂adaptation＂ in social- ecological systems. A question is： have these existing concepts fully described the performance of a system against disturbances？ In the practice of real-world disaster and risk management, the consent of wills and coordination of activities in a society often play a crucial role, which however can hardly be reflected or captured by existing concepts. This paper proposes a brand-new network property, consilience degree, which is especially used to eval- uate how well a system have integrated and coordinated resources, in order to deal with disturbances. Actually, consilinece degree can be viewed as a generalized node degree. In this paper, with the basic idea of consilinece degree, a set of new network properties and models are developed, which form a new theory to study complex systems. Our theoretical analyses and simulation results clearly prove that, consilienee degree reveals some new important system properties, which have been completely missed out by existing theories, and therefore, it pro- vides a new angle and fundamental tools to better understand complex systems.