Resilience denotes the capacity of a system to withstand shocks and the ability to recover from them. Hence, it combines two different concepts: Robustness captures the structural and adaptivity the dynamic dimension of resilience.

Conversely, resilience cannot be reduced to notions of robustness or stability. Rigid systems in engineering or society can be quite robust against shocks, but once they fail, they never recover. Resilience addresses the recovery, i.e. the response after shock.

Resilience should also not be confused with performance. Quite often, performance is maximized at the cost of lowering of resilience. The burn-out of high-profile managers or the breakdown of just-in-time production illustrate the difference. Eventually, resilience is also different from flexibility. Agile response to trends and FOMO, the fear of missing out, can quickly lead to a loss of focus for our core business or our social values.

We want to understand how the two dimensions robustness and adaptivity play to together to constitute resilience as a systemic property. Our research is targeted at social and economic systems, the most challenging ones because of their very volatile dynamics. Examples include social organizations, collectives and project teams in companies. Differently from engineered or ecological systems, a resilient reference state cannot be defined because individuals join or leave and financial or supply relations change quickly.

To model such systems, we combine agent-based modeling and multi-layer network approaches. They allow to quantify the impact of agents and their relations, using massive data about the collaboration and communication of indiviudals or distribution relations between firms. Based on these information, we model the robustness and the adaptivity of socio-economic systems and propose a novel resilience measure combining these two dimensions.

Frank Schweitzer

Related Publications

Disentangling the Timescales of a Complex System: A Bayesian Approach to Temporal Network Analysis

ArXiv Preprint - 2024

Giona Casiraghi and Georges Andres

Adapting to disruptions: Managing supply chain resilience through product rerouting

Science Advances - 2024

Ambra Amico, Luca Verginer, Giona Casiraghi, Giacomo Vaccario and Frank Schweitzer

Detecting and Optimising Team Interactions in Software Development

arXiv - 2023

Christian Zingg, Alexander von Gernler, Carsten Arzig, Frank Schweitzer and Christoph Gote

Modeling social resilience: Questions, answers, open problems

Advances in Complex Systems - 2022

Frank Schweitzer, Georges Andres, Giona Casiraghi, Christoph Gote, Ramona Roller, Ingo Scholtes, Giacomo Vaccario and Christian Zingg

Struggling with change: The fragile resilience of collectives

Perspectives on Psychological Science - 2022

Frank Schweitzer, Christian Zingg and Giona Casiraghi

Group relations, resilience and the I Ching

Physica A - 2022

Frank Schweitzer

The downside of heterogeneity: How established relations counteract systemic adaptivity in tasks assignments

Entropy, 23(12), 1677 - 2021

Giona Casiraghi, Christian Zingg and Frank Schweitzer

Quantifying the importance of firms by means of reputation and network control

Frontiers in Big Data - 2021

Yan Zhang and Frank Schweitzer

Fragile, Yet Resilient: Adaptive Decline in a Collaboration Network of Firms

Frontiers in Applied Mathematics and Statistics - 2021

Frank Schweitzer, Giona Casiraghi, Mario V. Tomasello and David Garcia

Modeling User Reputation in Online Social Networks: The Role of Costs, Benefits, and Reciprocity

Entropy - 2020

Frank Schweitzer, Pavlin Mavrodiev, A. M. Seufert and David Garcia

Intervention scenarios to enhance knowledge transfer in a network of firms

Frontiers in Physics - 2020

Frank Schweitzer, Yan Zhang and Giona Casiraghi

Improving the robustness of online social networks: A simulation approach of network interventions

Frontiers in Robotics and AI - 2020

Giona Casiraghi and Frank Schweitzer

Probing the robustness of nested multi-layer networks

2019

Giona Casiraghi, Antonios Garas and Frank Schweitzer

What is the Entropy of a Social Organization?

Entropy - 2019

Christian Zingg, Giona Casiraghi, Giacomo Vaccario and Frank Schweitzer

International crop trade networks: The impact of shocks and cascades

Environmental Research Letters - 2019

Rebekka Burkholz and Frank Schweitzer

Efficient message passing for cascade size distributions

Scientific Reports - 2019

Rebekka Burkholz

Social resilience in online communities: The autopsy of Friendster

2013

David Garcia, Pavlin Mavrodiev and Frank Schweitzer

Resilience in Enterprise Social Networks

In Proceedings of Informatik 2013, 43. Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. (GI), Informatik angepasst an Mensch, Organisation und Umwelt, 16. - 20. September 2013, Koblenz - 2013

Valentin Burger, Tobias Hofeld, David Garcia, Michael Seufert, Ingo Scholtes and David Hock