A major challenge when building complex and critical systems is the management of change in the system and in its operational environment. The increasing complexity forces autonomous systems to detect critical changes to avoid their progress towards undesirable states. We need new methods to build systems that can tune their adaptability protocols, transferring the control of uncertainty to their inner domain to strive for wellness. In essence, these are mechanisms to impose the fulfillment of system-wide wellness requirements to reduce the influence of the outer domain to be fully driven by the influence of the inner one. From the stance of cognitive systems, biological emotion suggests a strategy to configure value-based systems to use semantic self-representations of the state. A method inspired by emotion theories can causally connect the inner domain of the system and its objectives of wellness, focusing on dynamically adapting the system to avoid the progress of critical states. This method shall endow the system with a transversal mechanism to monitor its inner processes, detecting critical states and managing its adaptivity in order to maintain the wellness goals. The paper describes the current vision produced by this work-in-progress.

Emotions and the engineering of adaptiveness in complex systems. M.G. sanchez-Escribano & R. Sanz. INCOSE Conference on Systems Engineering Research (CSER 2014)

Draft paper @ ASLab