Network analysis applied to large-scale cyber-ecosystems

Network analysis is an important methodology that has been applied in systems ecology. Many theoretical insights have arisen from this approach, primarily the importance of indirect relations in ecosystems and the holistic determination of ecological relations. This approach, adopted from economic input-output analysis, treats systems as interconnected nodes and arcs of material or energy transfer. Due to the difficulty in quantifying large-scale, complex models, most ecological network models are aggregated or lumped models of a few general characteristics. Therefore, the resultant theory was tested using small-scale models with only a small number of compartments. Here, I present a way to develop large-scale cyber-models in order to test four of the main hypotheses of network analysis using models with a large number of compartments. The results show that the hypotheses are affected by model size. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All fights reserved.