Controlling Cost in Sandpile Models Through Local Adjustment of Drive

Controlling self-organized criticality in sandpile models

We introduce an external control to reduce the size of avalanches in some sandpile models exhibiting self organized criticality. This rather intuitive approach seems to be missing in the vast literature on such systems. The control action, which amounts to triggering avalanches in sites that are near to be come critical, reduces the probability of very large events, so that energy dissipation occurs most locally. The control is applied to a directed Abelian sandpile model driven by both uncorrelated and correlated deposition. The latter is essential to design an efficient and simple control he…