System Reconfiguration is essential in management of complex systems because it allows companies better flexibility and adaptability. System evolutions have to be managed in order to ensure system effectivity and efficiency through its whole lifecycle, in particular when it comes to complex systems that have decades of development and up to hundreds of years of usage. System Reconfiguration can be considered and deployed in different lifecycle phases. Two significant phases are considered for configuration management and System Reconfiguration: design-time-allowing system performances by modifying the architecture in early stages-and run-time-allowing optimization of performances during the in-service operations. This paper gives an overview of a field research being initiated and currently undergoing to capture the strengths and the shortages in the current industrial landscape. It also discusses possible future management strategies with regard to identified issues and challenges.

One of the aims of systems engineering is to develop systems with a number of pre-defined configurations, in order to operate effectively and efficiently in different contexts and environments. Early in the design phase, system reconfiguration allows to propose and optimize these configurations. With regard to the literature review and industrial observation, pre-defining the standard configurations without relying on hints from end users has been raised as a major difficulty within the industry. In this paper, we propose a reconfiguration framework which considers data collected from the use phase in order to generate valid and optimized configurations with regard to stakeholders needs.

System reconfiguration is essential in complex systems management, as it is an enabler of system flexibility and adaptability. It ensures system operation and increases reliability, availability, maintainability, testability, safety, and reuse of system entities and technologies. For the reconfiguration of a system in use, it is necessary to assess, in continuity, the system's state with regard to its context. Identifying data supporting system reconfiguration represents a major industrial challenge and is linked directly to the development of industrial reconfiguration tools. Reconfiguration tools are based on a data model, also called ontology, which represents key concepts of system reconfiguration and their relationships. A particular difficulty of developing the data model is the multi-domain nature of reconfiguration. Furthermore, it needs to address a considerable diversity of system types. Few publications propose an ontology supporting data identification and tool development for the entire process. Hence, in this paper we propose to formalize the system reconfiguration process and propose an overarching ontology, which we call OSysRec. This ontology considers data at the management, dynamics, and structure level. The proposed ontology has been developed based upon expert knowledge and several industrial uses cases. The OSysRec ontology allowed a better understanding of the reconfiguration process, and hence it can be deployed for developing efficient and effective reconfiguration tools at the industrial scale. The ontology has been tested on an industrial case study to validate the proposed approach.

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System Reconfiguration is essential in complex systems management, as it is an enabler of system adaptability with regard to system evolutions. System evolutions have to be managed to ensure system effectiveness and efficiency through its whole life cycle, particularly when it comes to complex systems that take years of development and dozens of years of usage. In this context, system reconfiguration ensures system operation and maintains system “ilities” (e.g., reliability, availability, maintainability, testability, and safety). This research has been conducted in the context of a large international aerospace, space, ground transportation, defense, and security company. This research aims at supporting system reconfiguration during operations. Within current industrial practices, the development of reconfiguration support is challenging as it requires integrating data related to observations (from operations) and system design (from engineering). More specifically, there is a need to integrate and link relevant reconfiguration data concerning the system objectives, operational context, and level of functioning. This paper proposes integrating and linking this fundamental data within a reconfiguration method. MBSysRec is a multidisciplinary method that involves configuration generation and a multi-criteria decision-making method for configuration evaluation and selection to support system reconfiguration during operations. The method has been implemented on two projects based on historical data. Resulting configurations have been discussed and assessed by system reconfiguration experts. A SAR case study is used to demonstrate the method. The method is proven effective for finding relevant system configurations for reconfiguring the already deployed system to achieve search and rescue missions.