Special Studies - EE 67598 02
Resiliency of Consumer-Resource Systems:
a dynamical systems approach

University of Notre Dame


Spring 2017 - Register for Special Studies (EE 67598-02 (25490)
Time-Location: - by appointment
Instructor M.D. Lemmon - Dept. of Electrical Engineering

Course Vault



Overview: These lectures are based on a seminar entitled Resilience of Coupled Human and Natural Systems that I organized in Fall 2015 for Notre Dame's biology department. That seminar examined resilience using ecological regime shifts [Folke, Carl, et al. "Regime shifts, resilience, and biodiversity in ecosystem management." Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics (2004): 557-581.] and C.S. Holling's cycle of adaptive renewal [Holling, Crawford S. "Understanding the complexity of economic, ecological, and social systems." Ecosystems 4.5 (2001): 390-405.] as organizing themes. Under this viewpoint, resilient systems become systems that traverse a non-terminating cycle of collapse and recovery. In this cycle regime shifts play a critical role in triggering system collapse or initiating system recovery.

The lectures in this special studies course are intended for engineering and science students with a strong interest in the mathematical tools used to model and manage complex networked systems. These lectures again focus on ecosystems, but now confine their attention to food webs with consumer-resource dynamics. Consumer-resource dynamics occur when a network's subsystems have local states whose dynamics are dominated by how resources are exchanged between different subsystems. This principle is found in ecosystem food webs, but it also appears in social and economic systems. It is also found in many networked engineering systems as well. What these lecture do is present the mathematical foundations for these dynamical systems in a systematic manner that is accessible to first or second year engineering graduate students. The objective of these lectures is to provide the foundations upon which these students can then go on and conduct original research addressing the open challenges remaining in this field.