Abstract:
Designing engineering systems for flexibility is of utmost importance for future generations of systems designers and operators. As a core system property, flexibility provides systems owners and operators with the ability to respond easily and cost-effectively to future changes. It contributes to improved economic value, sustainability, and resilience by enabling systems to adapt and reconfigure in the face of uncertainty in operations, markets, regulations, and technology. The field of flexibility in design has steadily evolved over the last two decades, emerging from the area of real options analysis, which focuses on quantifying the value of flexibility in large-scale, irreversible investment projects. Flexibility in design goes further by developing and evaluating novel design methods and computational procedures to enable flexibility as a systematic value enhancement mechanism in engineering systems. This chapter provides an overview of how the field has developed over time as well as design frameworks, computational methods, and algorithmic procedures to support such design activities in practice. It discusses important challenges and limitations with supporting case studies in aerospace, automotive, energy, real estate, transportation, and water management. The chapter highlights future directions for research, involving sustainability and resilience, data-driven real options, empirical studies and simulation games, machine learning, digital twin modelling, and 3D virtualization. Β© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.
