Controlling self-organized criticality in sandpile models

Abstract

We introduce an external control to reduce the size of avalanches in some sandpile models exhibiting self organized criticality. This rather intuitive approach seems to be missing in the vast literature on such systems. The control action, which amounts to triggering avalanches in sites that are near to be come critical, reduces the probability of very large events, so that energy dissipation occurs most locally. The control is applied to a directed Abelian sandpile model driven by both uncorrelated and correlated deposition. The latter is essential to design an efficient and simple control heuristic, but has only small influence in the uncontrolled avalanche probability distribution. The proposed control seeks a tradeoff between control cost and large event risk. Preliminary results hint that the proposed control works also for an undirected sandpile model.

References in corpus (2)

• Avalanche prediction in Self-organized systems
• The role of optimization in the human dynamics of tasks execution

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Controlling Self-Organizing Dynamics on Networks Using Models that Self-Organize
• Cascading failures in scale-free interdependent networks
• Self-Organization of Dragon Kings
• Controlling self-organized criticality in complex networks
• A dynamical programming approach for controlling the directed abelian Dhar-Ramaswamy model
• On the effect of the drive on self-organized criticality
• Control instabilities and incite slow-slip in generalized Burridge-Knopoff models