Catching the “Network Science” Bug November 19, 2008
Posted by Michael Trick in : Networks 2008 , comments closedIn the September-October, 2008, issue of Operations Research, David Alderson of the Naval Postgraduate School offers insights and opportunities for operations researchers in the area of network science. From the abstract:
Recent efforts to develop a universal view of complex networks have created both excitement and confusion about the way in which knowledge of network structure can be used to understand, control, or design system behavior. This paper offers perspective on the emerging field of “network science” in three ways. First, it
briefly summarizes the origins, methodological approaches, and most celebrated contributions within this
increasingly popular field. Second, it contrasts the predominant perspective in the network science literature
(that abstracts away domain-specific function and instead focuses on graph theoretic measures of system
structure and dynamics) with that of engineers and practitioners of decision science (who emphasize the
importance of network performance, constraints, and tradeoffs). Third, it proposes optimization-based reverse
engineering to address some important open questions within network science from an operations research
perspective. We advocate for increased, yet cautious, participation in this field by operations researchers.
You can find the full article here.
The editors of Operations Research have invited four senior researchers to provide commentaries on this work.