The challenge of complexity

Both users and designers are faced with a growing range of challenges in respect of their ability to interact with increasingly complex systems which are capable of both user configuration and autonomous self-(re)configuration, often drawing on both information and components from The Cloud as required in order to do so. From the perspective of the mechatronics system designer this results in an increasing abstraction within the design process as they deal with the integration of numbers of system components, which may themselves be configured from smart sub-systems. In contrast, users tend to be focussed on establishing the functional constraints under which the system is required to operate, with little or no knowledge of, or access to, individual system elements. Indeed, it may well be that the system designer will choose to hide such details from users so as to minimise the need for them to re-learn operating modes after configuration changes and updates.
The paper sets out to identify issues associated with this growth in system complexity and their relationships with the user, the designer and with the system itself, including the impact of factors such as privacy and ethics.