Adding a Detrital Actor to Increase System of System Resilience: A Case Study Test of a Biologically Inspired Design Heuristic to Guide Sociotechnical Network Evolution

Abstract

Networking complex sociotechnical systems into larger Systems of Systems (SoS) typically results in improved performance characteristics including sustainability, efficiency, and productivity. The response, or lack thereof, of many SoS to unexpected constituent system failures undermines their effectiveness in many cases. SoS performance after faults can be improved by improving the SoS’s hard (physical design) or soft (human intervention) resilience. The current approaches to increase resilience are limited due to the cost and necessary of human response increasing non-linearly with SoS scale. The limitations of current approaches require a novel design approach to improve SoS network resilience. We hypothesize that biologically inspired network design can improve SoS resilience. To illustrate this, a systems dynamics model of a Forestry Industry is presented and an optimization search over potential hard and soft resilience approaches is compared to a biologically inspired network improvement. SoS network resilience is measured through the newly developed System of System Resilience Measurement (SoSRM). Our first result provides evidence that biologically inspired network design provides an approach to increase SoS resilience beyond hard and soft resilience improvements alone. Second, this work provides evidence that having a SoS constituent fulfill the ecosystem role of detrital actor increases resilience. Third, this paper documents the first case study using the new SoSRM metric to justify a design decision. Finally, this case study provides a counter-example to the theory that increased sustainability always results in increased resilience. By comparing biologically inspired network redesign and optimized traditional resilience improvements, this paper provides evidence that biologically inspired intervention may be the needed strategy to increase sociotechnical SoS network resilience, improve SoS performance, and overcome the limitations of traditional resilience improvement approaches.