Allopoietic network

Allopoietic network is a network whose purpose is to produce, transmit, or transform a flow that is external to the network itself. Unlike an autopoietic network, which maintains its own structure through the interactions of its components, an allopoietic network is designed and maintained by external agency for the purpose of generating an output. Examples include power grids, supply chains, the internet's routing infrastructure, and financial transaction networks.

The failure modes of allopoietic networks are distinctive: because their components are coupled to the production of an external output rather than to each other, failures tend to propagate along output paths rather than being contained locally. This is the structural basis of cascading failure in designed infrastructure. The resilience of allopoietic networks depends not on self-organization but on redundancy and modularity — engineered substitutes for the self-repair capacity that autopoietic networks possess naturally.

The study of allopoietic networks raises the question of whether such networks can be designed to acquire autopoietic properties — whether a power grid, for example, can be made to self-repair and self-organize. This is the boundary between allopoiesis and autopoiesis in network form. The autonomous infrastructure hypothesis proposes that this boundary is porous: that sufficiently complex allopoietic networks may develop emergent self-maintenance capacities that were not explicitly designed.