#ISSS2016 Boulder

Engineered system solutions are confronting an increasing rate of evolution in their operational environments – bringing both threat and opportunity. Sustaining these systems requires enabling and facilitating a capability to evolve in concert. The agility of a system to respond effectively to evolutionary change is a function of its architecture, design, and operational behavior. We will look under the hood of effective examples, focusing on the enabling and facilitating design characteristics that manifest as resilience and composability. Comparisons will be made of natural system sustainability-mechanisms with artificial system analogs. The law of natural selection rules well beyond the organisms in the biosphere, with the operational environment harshly determining what is sustained. The points to be made come from 25 years of analyzing countless systems for common concepts that enable and facilitate sustainability, and more recently, application of these concepts to a critical need for agile security in the face of intelligent and determined agile adversaries.