Systems Engineering in the Fourth Industrial Revolution

17Closed‐Loop Mission Assurance Based on Flexible Contracts: A Fourth Industrial Revolution Imperative

Azad M. Madni and Michael Sievers

Synopsis

The fourth industrial revolution blends physical, digital, and biological domains into what is commonly referred to as cyber‐physical systems. This revolution is capitalizing on advances in technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, biological sensing, human behavior modeling, nanotechnology, and the internet of things. As system complexity and integration challenges continue to grow, our ability to understand their behavior decreases, making them more vulnerable to disruptive events. Thus, fourth generation industrial systems must be able to detect, isolate, eliminate/withstand a continual barrage of unexpected, previously unseen operating conditions. Although traditional fault‐tolerance and mission assurance (MA) methods are an essential component of the needed resilience, dealing with unknown‐unknowns requires greater sophistication and vigilance than exists in today's systems. However, even with exquisite designs and novel resilience schemes, we cannot always ascertain a priori whether a complex cyber‐physical system will operate as expected, slide into trouble, or face an imminent crash. Furthermore, we cannot always know a priori what to do even if we did know the state of the system. Therefore, what is needed is requisite flexibility in how a system can respond and a way for continually monitoring and evaluating ...