Network Science as New Systemics

Starting from the last years of the past century, the number of papers and books using, within the most different scientific domains, the networks as the main conceptual tool undergo a fast growth. This circumstance allowed the introduction of the generic name of network science (see, for instance, Barabasi & Posfai, 2016; Lewis, 2009a) to denote a number of contributions having in common the fact of using the mathematical machinery of graph theory as well as of its consequences. The interest in the network science was justified by the fact that its methods allowed to obtain new and interesting results regarding collective systems.As well known, this expression denotes systems made by a large number of reciprocally interacting basic units, whose study is often very difficult by resorting to traditional mathematical tools. Despite that, the tools of network science allowed, since the first papers, not only to characterize the possible dynamical evolution of some kinds of collective systems but also to forecast in advance their survival ability in the presence of damages and their usefulness as supporters of information transmission.