Here at Meshforum, watching Dr. Anna Nagurney doing an excellent overview of what Networks are.
She’s explaining all the networks around us, from transportation to web traffic, to water and power, to the Romans and the ‘flow problem’ they had with too many chariots at a given time of day.
Network analysis power is that it can show connections we may not have known were there.
There are classic examples like the Shortest path problem, maximum flow problem, minimum cost flow (Find flow pattern for transportation that minimizes the total cost from shipping to destination).
Other examples for these 3 examples – ex maximum flow – are things like shortest path to exit a building – same theories apply to genome sequencing and storing books in libraries.
She’s giving great examples, I can’t type this fast 🙂
I will link to her slides when they’re available.
Talking about transportation routes – the huge number of possible paths to work for example.
Talking about Braess’ Paradox. […(from that link) author provided an example of a traffic network in which travel costs increased when a link was added to the network]. She gave an example where adding a road to make more choices for commuters ends up increasing time of travel for all travelers…
Also relevant to the Internet – adding networks can make things worse for everyone – that’s interesting – I need to learn more about this.
Concept of Supernetworks, which she’s written books about.
Discussion of supply chain and social networks – better relationships might lower transaction costs.
Interesting – some of this work might be helpful to this project at NYU’s Center for Catastrophe Preparedness and Response regarding enhancing medical response in a time of crisis.
Update: My public Flickr photos for MeshForum are here.