Fluid Boundaries in Emerging Complex Intelligent Systems: System, Operational, and Organizational Perspectives

Rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI) are driving the evolution of complex products and systems (CoPS) into complex intelligent systems (CoIS). The introduction of AI implies generativity and increasingly fluid boundaries in such systems and presents challenges for organizations to control and manage systems that are safety critical. Building on a case study represents future CoIS, this article explores fluid boundaries in CoIS, including approaches for navigating system criticality and generativity. The findings point to the relationship between fluid boundaries and a stable organizational and system core, along with a shared core mission. Together, they serve as a platform that enables both contributions from various constituent systems and dynamic reconfigurations of the overall system-of-systems. System criticality and generativity are navigated through setting bounds to generativity by checks and balances involving both human and AI, including safety requirements for constituent systems and overall human oversight. Such an approach extends beyond traditional system integration activities and alters the role of CoIS integrators.