How resilient are our societies? Analyses, models, and preliminary results

Traditional social organizations such as those for the management of healthcare and civil defense are the result of designs and realizations that matched well with an operational context considerably different from the one we are experiencing today: A simpler world, characterized by a greater amount of resources to match less users producing lower peaks of requests. The new context reveals all the fragility of our societies: unman-ageability is just around the corner unless we do not complement the "old recipes" with smarter forms of social organization. Here we analyze this problem and propose a refinement to our fractal social organizations as a model for resilient cyber-physical societies. Evidence to our claims is provided by simulating our model in terms of multi-agent systems.

I. Introduction

Regardless of its nature, any system is affected by its design assumptions. Our societies are no exception. The emergence of sought properties such as economic and social welfare for all; sustainability with respect to natural ecosystems; and especially manageability and resilience, highly depends on the way social organizations are designed. A typical case in point is given by traditional organizations operating in domains such as healthcare and crisis management. A common assumption characterizing those organizations is the adoption of a strict client-server model. This produces at least the following major consequences: