a method for assessing the ability of complex engineered systems under uncertainty

Engineered systems are manmade systems created to deliver value/service to stakeholders. many engineered systems should be operated for long period of times within unpredictable and dynamic conditions. uncertainty can affect system output and its value/service delivery through different ways such as shifts in stakeholder needs and perturbations. it is important for end users to ensure that the system is operable and reliable in unknown environment. assessing system capability and its ability to do missions under uncertainty conditions is still an important problem for end users. nonfunctional properties such as flexibility and changeability are presented and formulated as a response to decrease the impact of dynamic complexities on system value/service delivery. in this paper viability as a good criterion is selected to measure system capability under uncertainty and a 7step method is developed to measure it. the proposed method has three characteristics: describing the uncertainty in operational environment, analyzing how the uncertainty will affect functional and physical characteristics of the system and finally representing regions in the system architecture that are mostly impacted by operational uncertainties. design structure matrix (dsm) is used to represent relationships between system properties and uncertain scenarios. finally, an example is presented to show the application of the method.