Network Analysis in Natural Sciences and Engineering

This special issue is devoted to research in the area of network analysis which has over the last years come to the fore in a variety of scientific disciplines, including Biology, Computer Science, Mathematics and Physics. Network analysis originally emerged as a key technique in Social Sciences to study patterns inherent in people's interactions. More recently, Natural Sciences and Engineering have developed considerable interest in complex network structures and dynamics in artificial and biological systems to investigate aspects of complexity, community structures, error and attack tolerance, adaptability, and propagation patterns. Following the success of the workshop ``Network Analysis in Natural Sciences and Engineering" which we organised in April 2006 as part of the AISB'06 Convention on "Adaptation in Artificial and Biological Systems" in Bristol, we issued an open call for papers for this special issue, and also invited the 19 authors who had contributed to our workshop to submit extended versions of their papers. We received 20 submissions, from which we selected the six contributions included in this special issue on the basis of two reviews per paper. The area of network analysis addresses a wide spectrum of techniques for studying domains consisting of individuals that are linked together into complex natural or artificial networks, such as communication networks, social networks and biological networks. The large variety in the networks' nature and the studied aspects as well as the wide spectrum of applied scientific methods is well reflected in the diversity of the contributions to this special issue. ...