Dynamic Complexity Measures for Use in Complexity-Based System Design

Abstract

Difficulty predicting system behaviors introduces a certain level of complexity to a system design. The INCOSE systems engineering handbook indicates that system complexity is one of the seven key challenges influencing development when engineering a system of systems. The scope of this paper is first to survey systems engineering relevant definitions of complexity for latter application to the complexity evaluation framework. The literature search also includes state-of-the-art works on system complexity measurement. Before proposing new techniques, the current complexity-based system, and interface measurement and design techniques are explored. As the state-of-the-art only includes static/structural complexity quantification, entropy-based measures for dynamic complexity quantification are proposed. A sample system is evaluated using the proposed dynamic complexity measures and the results are discussed. The methods proposed herein provide a first step in the path to an enhanced system/interface complexity evaluation framework using dynamic complexity measures.