Research Priorities

• Population networks - how can we account for local patch dynamics, spatial structure and migration patterns?
• Power networks - how do we diagnose faults in complex and distributed systems?

Researchers

• Chief Investigator: Phil Pollett
• Research Fellow: Ross McVinish
• PhD student : Jessica Chan
• PhD student : Dejan Jovanovic
• PhD student : Aminath Shausan
• PhD student : Andrew Smith
• Vacation scholar: Ryan Heneghan

Selected Research Projects

• Stochastic Models for Population Networks

  Project leader: Phil Pollett (UQ)
  Researchers: Jessica Chan (UQ), Ross McVinish (UQ), Aminath Shausan (UQ) and Andrew Smith (UQ)

  This is a major ongoing project. We are studying populations that occupy several geographically separated habitat patches. Although the individual patches may become extinct locally, they may be recolonized through migration from other patches. We are developing models that account for the persistence of these populations and which provide an effective means of studying their long-term behaviour. We have given particular attention to populations for which extinction and colonization happens in distinct phases, often at different stages in the organism's life cycle. Deterministic and distributional approximation methods have been developed. We have also constructed models for spatially structured populations, exploiting recent developments in stochastic network theory; by recording the numbers of individuals in the various patches, we are able to incorporate local patch dynamics, spatial structure and migration patterns.

  Research outputs

  • ² McVinish, R. and P.K. Pollett (2013) The limiting behaviour of a stochastic patch occupancy model. Journal of Mathematical Biology 67, 693-716.
  • ² McVinish, R. and P.K. Pollett (2013) Interaction between habitat quality and an Allee-like effect in metapopulations. Ecological Modelling 249, 84-89.
  • ¹ McVinish, R. and P.K. Pollett (2013) The deterministic limit of a stochastic logistic model with individual variation. Mathematical Biosciences 241, 109-114.
  • ¹ McVinish, R. and P.K. Pollett (2014) The limiting behaviour of Hanski's incidence function metapopulation model. Journal of Applied Probability 51, 297-316.
  • ¹ Smith, A., McVinish, R. and P.K. Pollett (2014) A model for a spatially structured metapopulation accounting for within patch dynamics. Mathematical Biosciences 247, 69-79.
  • Additionally, this work was presented at the 3rd Australia and New Zealand Applied Probability Workshop (University of Queensland, Brisbane, 8-11 July 2013).

  ¹ To be reported in connection with ARC Discovery Grant DP120102398 "Random Network Models with Applications in Biology".
  ² To be reported in connection with ARC Discovery Grant DP110101929 "New Methods for Improving Active Adaptive Management in Biological Systems".

• Fault Detection and Diagnosis in Complex and Distributed Systems

  Project leader: Phil Pollett (UQ)
  Researchers: Ross McVinish (UQ) and Dejan Jovanovic (UQ)

  We are developing methods for detecting, identifying and isolating faults in complex and distributed systems. We have derived stochastic models that are capable of interpreting the state of the system via local observations and information exchange with neighbouring subsystems.

  Research outputs

  • ¹ Jovanovic, D. and P.K. Pollett (2014) Distributed fault diagnosis using consensus of unobservable Markov chains. In (Eds. Honglei Xu and Xiangyu Wang) Optimization and Control Methods in Industrial Engineering and Construction. Springer Series on Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering, Vol. 72, pp. 85-105.

  ¹ To be reported in connection with ARC Discovery Grant DP120102398 "Random Network Models with Applications in Biology".

Awards and Achievements

• Vacation scholar Ryan Heneghan was awarded an AMSI Vacation Research Scholarship for a project titled "Exploring Vaccination Methods for an SIR Epidemic on a Random Population Network with Household Structure and Varying Rates of Infectivity and Severity" (November 2013)
• PhD student Andrew Smith was awarded second prize for the best student talk at the 3rd Australia and New Zealand Applied Probability Workshop, University of Queensland (July 2013)