Intrinsic Flexibility and Robustness in Adaptive Systems: A Conceptual Framework

Dealing with uncertainty is an important issue in a broad range of research fields and industrial applications. For example with outer space missions or unmanned vehicles in perilous environs, today's and future systems have to adapt to changing environmental conditions. But high specialization of today's systems also results in decreased robustness and flexibility. These systems show high performance. But in dynamic environments, they lack flexibility as well as robustness. In case of failure or changing conditions, also referred to as uncertainty or uncertain events, flexibility and robustness are crucial. Based on the proverb "prevention is better than cure!", mechanisms have to be implemented in technical systems to diminish the contrary behavior of robustness and flexibility compared to specialization. A conceptual framework based on a library related to concurrent version systems is proposed. Every change and modification on the system configuration is minuted over time. Thereby, the ability to fall back on a stable system state in critical situations, traps or impasses assures robustness and survivability