Exploring Simple Structural Configurations for Optimal Network Mutualism
Abstract
Energy flow is a primary organizing principle in ecological systems, and therefore various aspects of this have been proposed as ecological goal functions [8, 5]. One such goal function considers that the integral utility (direct + indirect) will tend to be positive in well-developed systems [3, 4, 10]. In this research, we investigate several basic network structures to determine the specifc relationship types between compartments and identify those structures that lead to greater quantitative and qualitative utility. This research contributes to the overall discipline of ecological network analysis.