Dear Colleagues,

Biological, social or human-made complex systems exhibit emergent collective phenomena, often arising from the structure and heterogeneity of the interactions between individual elements. Another notable phenomenon observed in complex systems is self-organized criticality.

Complex networks offer an efficient and powerful representation of these interactions. A variety of novel critical phenomena have been observed in complex networks, through exploration of generalized percolation and related processes occurring in networks, directed networks, weighted networks, multilayer networks, and networks of networks. The proximity of the system to a critical state may indicate optimization of information processing or another function. This optimization may be self-organized, or imposed externally. Optimization may be in the form of the process occurring in the network, or in the structure of the network itself.

This Special Issue aims to collect advances in the area of critical phenomena on complex networks, and their relation to and implications for optimization. Contributions may be theoretical or numerical studies of critical phenomena, exploration of or methods for optimization of networks or the processes occurring in them, and studies of self-organized systems.

Dr. Gareth Baxter
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Entropy is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• complex networks
• critical phenomena
• self-organized criticality
• complex systems
• network optimization
• processes on networks
• percolation