Transport and residential location consume substantial quantities of energy whilst serving only to facilitate primary economic and societal activities. The relationship between urban form and travel patterns is inherently complex: it can be influenced by policy but through many individual personal responses rather than being subject to explicit control. Managing the energy used in transport is therefore an indirect process that works by influencing the amount and distance of travel, the means by which travel takes place, and the energy requirement of the resulting travel. Achieving this effectively requires an a full understanding of the many complex interacting social processes that generate the demand for travel and impinge on the ways in which it is satisfied in terms of its supply. The complexity sciences provide a framework for organising this understanding. In this project, we argue that changes in energy costs generate surprising and unanticipated effects in complex systems such as cities, largely because of the many order effects that are generated when changes in movement and the energy utilities used to sustain locations generate multiplier effects that are hard to trace and even harder to contain. For example, as energy costs increase, people eventually reach a threshold beyond which they cannot sustain their existing travel patterns or even their locations and then rapid shifts occur in their behaviour. When energy costs reduce, these shifts are by no means symmetrical as people switch out of one activity into another, by changing location as well as mode.At UCL, we have four groups of researchers building models of urban and transport systems which provide related perspectives on these responses to changing energy costs. Wilson pioneered the development of entropy maximising approaches to transport and location in which energy and travel costs are essential determinants of travel and his recent work in nesting these models within a dynamics that generate unanticipated effects is key to understanding the kinds of changes that are now being effected by changing energy costs. In a complementary way, these models can be provided with a much stronger rationale using recent theories of spatial agglomeration which date back to Turing but find their clearest expression in the work of Krugman (TK models). These models thus inform the Boltzman-Lotka-Volterra (BLV) models developed by Wilson. Translating these models into physical infrastructures involves explicit developments in network science and Zhou and Heydecker's models suggest ways in which energy costs might be reduced by linking physical networks to flows generated by the BLV and TK models. What we propose here is to extend and develop these three approaches, extending our existing operational land use transport model for Greater London (built as part of the Tyndall Centre's Cities programme) to enable our partners to explore 'what if ' questions involving changing energy costs on the city.The methodologies we will employ to explore these models involve nonlinearities that are caused by positive feedback effects in complex systems where n'th order multiplier effects are endemic. We will use phase space representations to visualise such changes and then implement these in the operational land use transport model which we will disseminate to our partners in the quest to pose significant policy questions. We intend to provide a series of tightly coupled deliverables to progress this science to the point where it is directly usable by policy makers and professionals. We will communicate our findings using various kinds of web-based services being developed under related projects. In this way, we will develop best practice based on best science. We believe that we can demonstrate the essential logic of complexity science to a much wider constituency in developing insights into these most topical questions of the changing cost of energy.

The mathematical understanding of networks has increased dramatically over the past ten years and network theory is being increasingly applied to practical problems in business and society. However, the gathering of evidence is often difficult. Experts in the field with formal qualifications in economics, maths, statistics and physics are accustomed to working with quantitative data, however the best information specific to the problem is often qualitative and only available in narrative form. This project brings together Volterra Consulting, an economic consultancy dealing with practical business issues and Andrew Roach of the University of Glasgow, a historian with expertise in the analysis of networks from his work on medieval heresy and the early Inquisition. It is envisaged that Roach will provide training for Volterra staff in the efficient extraction of information from documents with a view to increasing both the quantity and quality of their modelling data, and participate in Volterra's work in providing practical solutions to business problems.\n\nThis project has come about as a result of Roach's collaboration with Paul Ormerod, director of Volterra. Three years ago they published an article in the journal 'Physica A' suggesting that not only did the medieval Cathar heresy display the characteristics of a scale-free network, but that contemporary inquisitors recognised its main characteristics and tailored their strategy accordingly. (A scale-free network consists of a few very well connected hubs amid a number of less connected nodes; it has several distinctive features, notably no 'threshold effect'- the threshold is zero, great robustness against random attack, but vulnerability to assaults which target the vital hubs). The KTF would allow them to develop their collaboration to look at contemporary issues as well as further historical projects.\n\nThe KTF would envisage a number of projects based on Volterra's future client base and giving papers to conferences in both the private and public sector. One of Roach and Ormerod's common interests is in reconstructing the networks which influence quite intimate aspects of people's lives, such as the choice of a family doctor, financial adviser or religious allegiance. In all these cases, faced with a bewildering range of 'products' the judging of which would require technical knowledge unavailable to the majority, most people fall back on the recommendations of friends and relations or their own reaction to the professionals involved. A premium seems to be attached to communication skills, availability for consultation, particularly at times of crisis and a general perception of good standing within the community. Often these figures turn out to be very highly connected 'friends of friends'. \n\nAllied to this is a common interest in security issues centring on the vulnerability of networks. Roach and Ormerod noted some time ago in an article in the 'THES', the similarity between the decentralised structures of medieval heretics such as the Cathars and the very loosely connected terrorist organisations of the twenty first century such as Al-Qaida. Counter-terrorism strategies traditionally centre on the capture of the terrorists themselves. Roach and Ormerod aim to explore more systematically the applicability of investigations against heresy which aimed to gain intelligence about the broader community, concentrating on the 'next layer down', those figures who have both international standing and are well connected locally. They act as conduits or messengers whereby initially alien ideas and personalities become accepted in local communities.\n\nNetwork modelling can also be used to illuminate purely historical questions and Roach and Ormerod are currently working on models to describe the effect of burning 'martyrs' in Marian England and to assess the appropriateness of disease metaphors in contemporary decsriptions of twelfth century heresy.

National infrastructure provides essential services to a modern economy: energy, transport, digital communications, water supply, flood protection, and waste water / solid waste collection, treatment and disposal. The OECD estimates that globally US$53 trillion of infrastructure investment will be needed by 2030. The UK's National Infrastructure Plan set out over £460 billion of investment in the next decade, but is not yet known what effect that investment will have on the quality and reliability of national infrastructure services, the size of the economy, the resilience of society or its impacts upon the environment. Such a gap in knowledge exists because of the sheer complexity of infrastructure networks and their interactions with people and the environment. That means that there is too much guesswork, and too many untested assumptions in the planning, appraisal and design of infrastructure, from European energy networks to local drainage systems. Our vision is for infrastructure decisions to be guided by systems analysis. When this vision is realised, decision makers will have access to, and visualisation of, information that tells them how all infrastructure systems are performing. They will have models that help to pinpoint vulnerabilities and quantify the risks of failure. They will be able to perform 'what-if' analysis of proposed investments and explore the effects of future uncertainties, such as population growth, new technologies and climate change. The UK Infrastructure Transitions Research Consortium (ITRC) is a consortium of seven UK universities, led by the University of Oxford, which has developed unique capability in infrastructure systems analysis, modelling and decision making. Thanks to an EPSRC Programme Grant (2011-2015) the ITRC has developed and demonstrated the world's first family of national infrastructure system models (NISMOD) for analysis and long-term planning of interdependent infrastructure systems. The research is already being used by utility companies, engineering consultants, the Institution of Civil Engineers and many parts of the UK government, to analyse risks and inform billions of pounds worth of better infrastructure decisions. Infrastructure UK is now using NISMOD to analyse the National Infrastructure Plan. The aim of MISTRAL is to develop and demonstrate a highly integrated analytics capability to inform strategic infrastructure decision making across scales, from local to global. MISTRAL will thereby radically extend infrastructure systems analysis capability: - Downscale: from ITRC's pioneering representation of national networks to the UK's 25.7 million households and 5.2 million businesses, representing the infrastructure services they demand and the multi-scale networks through which these services are delivered. - Upscale: from the national perspective to incorporate global interconnections via telecommunications, transport and energy networks. - Across-scale: to other national settings outside the UK, where infrastructure needs are greatest and where systems analysis represents a huge business opportunity for UK engineering firms. These research challenges urgently need to be tackled because infrastructure systems are interconnected across scales and prolific technological innovation is now occurring that will exploit, or may threaten, that interconnectedness. MISTRAL will push the frontiers of system research in order to quantify these opportunities and risks, providing the evidence needed to plan, invest in and design modern, sustainable and resilient infrastructure services. Five years ago, proposing theory, methodology and network models that stretched from the household to the globe, and from the UK to different national contexts would not have been credible. Now the opportunity for multi-scale modelling is coming into sight, and ITRC, perhaps uniquely, has the capacity and ambition to take on that challenge in the MISTRAL programme.