Adaptability: A System Science That Crosses Disciplines

Adaptive System Engineering (ASE) has been receiving substantial research, development and usages in recent years, especially with regard to aerospace product design. This paper reviews the works in this area, in particular pertaining to system adaptability, the characteristic of adaptive systems. This work is a review paper that visits the literature of this area, which shows that system adaptability is a way to achieve design sustainability, a way to achieve resilience, a risk mitigation method, a good criterion for acquisition, a way to optimize, a way of derivative product design, and a way to deal with complexity and uncertainty. From these existing works, the paper shows that system adaptability serves as a link that connects many different areas or disciplines in systems engineering. As a result, it is part of system science and may be a desirable built-in mechanism for all systems. These reviews can serve as training and education materials and inspire systems engineering researchers and practitioners to cross different disciplines, think “out of boxes” of each individual domain, and work together to create innovative research and useful practical solutions.