Ensuring Flexible Design Strategies for Complex Systems Engineering.

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This PhD seeks to investigate the application of complexity science tools and techniques tosystems engineering and design. Increasingly, companies like Thales are challenged todesign and deliver complex engineered systems that must be able to cope with ongoingchange in both their operational environment and the requirements of their users. Thesecomplex systems are characterised by their architecture (their scale, interconnectivity ofcomponents and ability to exchange information/energy with the environment), theirdynamic behaviour (non-linear, adaptive, decentralised control) and their behaviour (whichmay be emergent, may exhibit non Gaussian distributions). It is important to considercomplexity because conventional systems engineering and design principles are built on afoundation of reductionism and decomposability which are inadequate starting assumptionsto deal with complex systems. The research explores the complexity science approaches inthe application of systems engineering and design. Systems engineering and designprinciples include: requirements analysis, system thinking, system lifecycles, architectureframeworks and evaluation. The tools that could be exploited from complexity scienceinclude: graph theory, agent based modelling, non-linear dynamics and information theory.The research will analyse the utility of these approaches with a view to providing anoverarching framework for the application of complexity science to systems engineering anddesign.