| Description | Monday 24 to Tuesday 25 September 2007 Discussion Meeting at the Royal Society
By Professor Mike Smith, Dr Keith Briggs and Professor Frank Kelly FRS
This meeting will discuss mathematical, computational, and statistical issues common to transport and communication networks. The emphasis will be on generic features common to both fields.
The practical aims are to determine the best ways of managing existing networks, and of designing new networks. Areas to be covered include:
Road and rail networks are often subject to increasing flows, and new methods of congestion control are proposed. What is the right theoretical underpinning for these?
Data on which to base models is usually sparse and/or untrustworthy in the field of transport networks. How do we make the best use of the available data?
By contrast, for the internet we often have more data concerning topology and traffic levels than we can assimilate. How do we summarize and visualize such data?
Communication networks are expanding rapidly into new areas of knowledge and entertainment. What are the sociological consequences?
Designing new networks typically leads us into difficult combinatorial optimization problems. What is the state of the art here?
Models from graph theory are often proposed to describe topologies. How good are these descriptions?
New distributed algorithms are needed for many practical problems, to give us more robust and scalable methods. How far can we push the asynchronous distributed computation model?
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