Cooperative and collective effects in light of the maximum energy dissipation principle

We compare the collective phenomena in physics and cooperative phenomena in biology/chemistry in terms of the variational description. The maximum energy dissipation employed and the cost-like functional was chosen according to an optimal control based formulation. Using this approach, the variational outline has been considered for non-equilibrium thermodynamic conditions. The differences between the application of the proposed approach to the description of cooperative phenomena in chemical/biochemical kinetics and the Landau free energy approach to collective phenomena in physics have been investigated.