Big congratulations to BiSSL Ph.D. student Abheek Chatterjee for his paper “Ecology‐inspired resilient and affordable system of systems using degree of system order” – which investigates applying ecological resilience measures to the design of Systems of Systems (SoS) and has now been published!

Abstract: This research tests the value of using an ecology-inspired architectural metric, called the metric Degree of System Order (DoSO), to identify resilient and affordable engineered System of Systems (SoS) architectures. Analysis of long-surviving biological ecosystems (nature’s resilient SoS) using DoSO has revealed a unique balance of efficient and redundant interactions in their architectures. This balance is hypothesized to enable both effective resource utilization under normal operation and adaptability to survive and recover from perturbations. Optimal trade-off between resilience (the ability to survive and recover from disruptions) and affordability is highly desirable in engineering SoS as well. To test this analogy, the resilience vs. affordability tradespace of a large number of notional SoS architectures is investigated using the DoSO metric. Results indicate that the majority of Pareto optimal SoS architectures, under various disruption scenarios, lie in the ecologically identified favorable DoSO range. Further, SoS architectures within this DoSO range were found to have better resilience and affordability attributes, in general, than the architectures outside it. Evaluation of the DoSO metric does not require detailed simulations and is the first network architecture metric to consider resilience vs. affordability trade-offs, making it a valuable addition to the SoS engineering toolset.

A. Chatterjee, R. Malak, and A. Layton, “Ecology-inspired Resilient and Affordable System of Systems using Degree of System Order,” Systems Engineering, pp. 1-16, 2021, Art no. SYS21598, doi: 10.1002/sys.21598.