Complex Inventive Strategic Systems (CISS) - An abstract of a paper to be submitted for a conference

Complex, Inventive, Strategic Systems (CISS) -

A Lifecycle Framework using ALVIS thinking

Navneet Bhushan

Crafitti Consulting Pvt Ltd, (www.crafitti.com)

Emails: navneet.bhushan@crafitti.com,

Abstract

We define a new class of systems and products named Complex Inventive Strategic Systems (CISS). The challenges of discovering, defining, describing, designing, developing, deploying, and deducing (7Ds)  the CISS require a complete relook of their lifecycle. These systems are characterized by substantial decentralization, higher embedded/ambient intelligence, inherently conflicting, unknowable and diverse needs/requirements, continuous evolution/deployment, heterogeneous, inconsistent, and changing elements, erosion of people/system boundary, regular failures and new paradigms for acquisition and policy. Besides the advent of cyber-physical systems, increasing intelligence of technical systems, the massive scale of these systems coupled with strategic nature of many of these systems leads to unprecedented challenges. Today the largest systems being conceived are what in the military parlance are called System of Systems (SoS) and Ultra Large Scale Systems (ULSS). These cutting-edge systems are characterized by operational and managerial independence of elements, evolutionary development, emergent behavior and geographic distribution. Further their life cycle is exponentially impacted and the scale, inventiveness and strategic nature of these systems and products require completely new approaches.

Key aspects for 7Ds of  CISS lifecycle i.e., Value, Inventiveness, Human Interaction, Computational Emergence, multi-level Design, Computational Engineering, Adaptive System Infrastructure, Adaptable and Predictable System Quality, Policy, Acquisition and Management are explained. Five thinking dimensions proposed for CISS are Analytical, Logical, Value, Inventive, and Systems thinking (ALVIS). These thinking dimensions need to play a much larger part in an integrated manner than the current purely analogical thinking. We describe few case studies in ALVIS thinking and describe ALVIS thinking framework for 7Ds of CISS.

Keywords: Ultra Large Scale Systems, Value Thinking, Systems Thinking, Inventive Thinking, Product Life Cycle, Modeling, TRIZ, AHP, Design Structure Matrix, Set-Based Concurrent Engineering, ALVIS thinking, Complex Inventive Strategic Systems (CISS).

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