Controlling self-organized criticality in sandpile models

Abstract

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 become 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 depositions. The latter is essential to design an efficient and simple control heuristic, but has only small influence in the uncontrolled avalanche probability distribution. The proposed control seeks a trade-off between control cost and large event risk. Preliminary results hint that the proposed control works also for an undirected sandpile model.