Flexibility, Complexity, and Controllability in Large Scale Systems
System structure is a key determinant of system behavior. There is a particularly strong link between a system’s structure and its flexibility – it’s capacity to respond to changes. Often, adding flexibility entails adding complexity. In this paper, we propose measures for a system’s complexity that...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | en_US |
| Published: |
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering Systems Division
2016
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/103003 |
| Summary: | System structure is a key determinant of system behavior. There is a particularly strong link between a system’s structure and its flexibility – it’s capacity to respond to changes. Often, adding flexibility entails adding complexity. In this paper, we propose measures for a system’s complexity that are complementary to existing flexibility measures. Furthermore, flexibility often comes at the cost of some measure of control over the system’s behavior. We therefore propose a metric for system controllability that is complementary to our flexibility metric. |
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