This book contains contributions from the participants of the research group hosted by the ZiF - Center for Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Bielefeld during the period 2013-2017 as well as from the conclusive conference organized at Bielefeld in December 2017. The contributions consist of original research papers: they mirror the scientific developments fostered by this research program or the state-of-the-art results presented during the conclusive conference. The volume covers current research in the areas of operator theory and dynamical systems on networks and their applications, indicating possible future directions. The book will be interesting to researchers focusing on the mathematical theory of networks; it is unique as, for the first time, continuous network models - a subject that has been blooming in the last twenty years - are studied alongside more classical and discrete ones. Thus, instead of two different worlds often growing independently without much intercommunication, a new path is set, breaking with the tradition. The fruitful and beneficial exchange of ideas and results of both communities is reflected in this book.

One of the major contemporary challenges in both physical and social sciences is modeling, analyzing, and understanding the self-organization, evolution, behavior, and eventual decay of complex dynamical systems ranging from cell assemblies to the human brain to animal societies. The multi-faceted problems in this domain require a wide range of methods from various scienti?c disciplines. There is no question that the inclusion of time delays in complex system models considerably enriches the challenges presented by the problems. Although this inclusion often becomes inevitable as real-world applications demand more and more realistic m- els, the role of time delays in the context of complex systems so far has not attracted the interest it deserves. The present volume is an attempt toward ?lling this gap. There exist various useful tools for the study of complex time-delay systems. At the forefront is the mathematical theory of delay equations, a relatively mature ?eld in many aspects, which provides some powerful techniques for analytical inquiries, along with some other tools from statistical physics, graph theory, computer science, dynamical systems theory, probability theory, simulation and optimization software, and so on. Nevertheless, the use of these methods requires a certain synergy to address complex systems problems, especially in the presence of time delays.

This book contains contributions from the participants of the research group hosted by the ZiF - Center for Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Bielefeld during the period 2013-2017 as well as from the conclusive conference organized at Bielefeld in December 2017. The contributions consist of original research papers: they mirror the scientific developments fostered by this research program or the state-of-the-art results presented during the conclusive conference. The volume covers current research in the areas of operator theory and dynamical systems on networks and their applications, indicating possible future directions. The book will be interesting to researchers focusing on the mathematical theory of networks; it is unique as, for the first time, continuous network models - a subject that has been blooming in the last twenty years - are studied alongside more classical and discrete ones. Thus, instead of two different worlds often growing independently without much intercommunication, a new path is set, breaking with the tradition. The fruitful and beneficial exchange of ideas and results of both communities is reflected in this book.