A Bioinspired Framework for Analyzing and Predicting the Trade-off Between System of Systems Attributes

This research investigates a bioinspired framework for analyzing and predicting trade-offs between system of systems’ (SoS) performance, affordability, and resilience early in the design process – without the need for highly detailed simulations or disruption models. This framework builds on ecological research that has found a unique balance between redundancy and efficiency in biological ecosystems. This balance implies that highly efficient ecosystems tend to be inflexible and vulnerable to perturbations, while highly redundant ecosystems fail to utilize resources effectively for survival. Twenty architectures for a notional hostiles’ surveillance SoS are investigated, showing that highly efficient SoS architectures fail catastrophically in the face of disruptions, while highly redundant architectures are unnecessarily expensive: indicating that engineered SoS architectures follow a fitness trend akin to complex ecological networks. The results suggest that SoS may benefit from mimicking a balance of redundancy and efficiency similar to that found in ecological networks.