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Engineered systems are designed to deftly operate under predeterminedconditions yet are notoriously fragile when unexpected perturbations arise. Incontrast, biological systems operate in a highly flexible manner; learn quicklyadequate responses to novel conditions, and evolve new routines/traits toremain competitive under persistent environmental change. A recent theory onthe origins of biological flexibility has proposed that degeneracy - theexistence of multi-functional components with partially overlapping functions -is a primary determinant of the robustness and adaptability found in evolvedsystems. While degeneracy's contribution to biological flexibility is welldocumented, there has been little investigation of degeneracy design principlesfor achieving flexibility in systems engineering. Actually, the conditions thatcan lead to degeneracy are routinely eliminated in engineering design.  With the planning of transportation vehicle fleets taken as a case study,this paper reports evidence that degeneracy improves robustness andadaptability of a simulated fleet without incurring costs to efficiency. Wefind degeneracy dramatically increases robustness of a fleet to unpredictedchanges in the environment while it also facilitates robustness to anticipatedvariations. When we allow a fleet's architecture to be adapted in response toenvironmental change, we find degeneracy can be selectively acquired, leadingto faster rates of design adaptation and ultimately to better designs. Giventhe range of conditions where favorable short-term and long-term performanceoutcomes are observed, we propose that degeneracy design principlesfundamentally alter the propensity for adaptation and may be useful withinseveral engineering and planning contexts.

Evolutionary Mechanics: new engineering principles for the emergence of flexibility in a dynamic and uncertain world