Designing Complex Adaptive Systems Using a Stakeholder-Driven and Goal-Focused Framework
Open AccessComplex Adaptive Systems (CAS) exhibit emergent behaviors produced by non-linear actions amongst individual agents within the system and their environment. These emergent behaviors are difficult to anticipate and measure making it very challenging to initially design from the start. Developing CASs, such as an autonomous swarming unmanned system, is a relevant key task today for solving hard problems with limited resources in a demanding economy. Swarming unmanned systems are valued by their unique capabilities, but how do stakeholders ensure their needs are considered during development? Certain stakeholders have interests that go beyond the initial delivery of the system, yet developers seem to focus efforts on designing autonomous behaviors to satisfy immediate mission needs. To close this gap, a stakeholder-focused framework for evaluating CASs over a full system lifecycle for swarming unmanned systems is developed and described throughout this research. A Goal Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE) modeling methodology, KAOS (Knowledge Acquisition in AutOmated Specification), is used to map requirements between stakeholder goals and autonomous behaviors. Behaviors are analyzed in an agent-based simulation using NetLogo for quantifying stakeholder driven performance qualities (-ilities). A case study was performed for a swarm of unmanned surface vessels called wave gliders to evaluate performance over the operational life. Results showed that there is a significant difference in system performance due to the environment and general differences in performance due to changing physical design parameters and autonomous behaviors.
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