Applying systems and safety engineering principles for antifragility

Traditional systems engineering can be seen as a range of activities and techniques aiming at developing a system (or product) in a systematic and predictable way. In particular safety engineering standards aim at developing "safe" systems that continue to provide their intended behaviour even when faults or hazards occur. Often, the approach will be relatively static and the aim will be to mitigate the analysed risks as this is the easiest way to verify the safety property. Antifragile systems [10] however are defined as systems that adapt after a fault occurs and are not only resilient but also learn from faults and incidents to improve their delivered service level. This paper investigates antifragility in the context of systems engineering and proposes a normative criterion that helps to understand the pre-conditions reaching antifragility. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.