Improving System-of-Systems Agility through Dynamic Reconfiguration

Most System-of-Systems (SoS) problems face a highly dynamic, volatile, and uncertain environment. How to cope with the unpredictable and volatile changes is one of the key challenges for SoS practitioners. Agility, as an informative feature indicating an SoS's capability of effecting, coping with and exploiting changes, has not received sufficient attention in the context of SoS. This paper proposes a dynamic reconfiguration method that aims to improve the SoS agility from the perspectives of responding quickly to failures and recovering some amount of the SoS capability. This paper employs approximate dynamic programming method to compute the dynamic reconfiguration decisions that allow failed or degraded systems to be removed and the function-capability allocation to be changed quickly. A naval warfare SoS example takes a preliminary step towards demonstrating the effectiveness of the dynamic reconfiguration method, along with flexible architecture, in achieving the SoS agility in terms of responsiveness and resilience.