Expansionism-Based Design and System of Systems

Abstract

Facing the growing complexity within technological products and systems, traditional reductionism-based design approaches, which focus on decomposing and optimizing subsystems, components, and their interrelationships, will face greater difficulties in the search for future innovation. In such cases, expansionism-based design will be particularly effective because it reduces the need to deal with the superior internal complexity of existing systems and primarily explores design opportunities by integrating and synthesizing previously unrelated independent systems into a new system of systems. The system of systems that results from expansionism-based design may improve the functionalities and performances of the prior systems, or obtain novel functionalities of the system of systems from the synthesis. In this paper, we identify the system theory roots of design expansionism, and elaborate the value of expansionism-based design and how it enables design opportunities for systems-of-systems. We also preliminarily discuss potential concept generation methods to aid in expansionism-based design and the analytics of collective dynamics and emergent behaviors of the resulting system of systems in order to effectively architect and manage them.