Consilience degree——a new network property to evaluate system's performance against disturbances

To study the performance of a system against disturbances, many important concepts have been developed, such as "robustness" in systems science, and "vulnerability", "resilience" and "adaptation" in social-ecological systems. A question is: have these existing concepts fully described the performance of a system against disturbances? In the practice of real-world disaster and risk management, the consent of wills and coordination of activities in a society often play a crucial role, which however can hardly be re ected or captured by existing concepts. This paper proposes a brand-new network property, consilience degree, which is especially used to evaluate how well a system have integrated and coordinated resources, in order to deal with disturbances. Actually, consilinece degree can be viewed as a generalized node degree. In this paper, with the basic idea of consilinece degree, a set of new network properties and models are developed, which form a new theory to study complex systems. Our theoretical analyses and simulation results clearly prove that, consilience degree reveals some new important system properties, which have been completely missed out by existing theories, and therefore, it provides a new angle and fundamental tools to better understand complex systems.