Engineered systems are designed to deftly operate under predetermined conditions yet are notoriously fragile when unexpected perturbations arise. In contrast, biological systems operate in a highly flexible manner; learn quickly adequate responses to novel conditions, and evolve new routines and traits to remain competitive under persistent environmental change. A recent theory on the origins of biological flexibility has proposed that degeneracy—the existence of multi-functional components with partially overlapping functions—is a primary determinant of the robustness and adaptability found in evolved systems. While degeneracy’s contribution to biological flexibility is well documented, there has been little investigation of degeneracy design principles for achieving flexibility in systems engineering. Actually, the conditions that can lead to degeneracy are routinely eliminated in engineering design. With the planning of transportation vehicle fleets taken as a case study, this article reports evidence that degeneracy improves the robustness and adaptability of a simulated fleet towards unpredicted changes in task requirements without incurring costs to fleet efficiency. We find that degeneracy supports faster rates of design adaptation and ultimately leads to better fleet designs. In investigating the limitations of degeneracy as a design principle, we consider decision-making difficulties that arise from degeneracy’s influence on fleet complexity. While global decision-making becomes more challenging, we also find degeneracy accommodates rapid distributed decision-making leading to (near-optimal) robust system performance. Given the range of conditions where favorable short-term and long-term performance outcomes are observed, we propose that degeneracy may fundamentally alter the propensity for adaptation and is useful within different engineering and planning contexts.

中文翻译：

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进化力学：在动态和不确定的世界中出现灵活性的新工程原理。

工程系统旨在在预定条件下灵活运行，但在出现意外扰动时却非常脆弱。相比之下，生物系统以高度灵活的方式运作；快速学习对新条件的适当反应，并发展新的惯例和特征，以在持续的环境变化下保持竞争力。最近关于生物灵活性起源的理论提出，简并性——具有部分重叠功能的多功能组件的存在——是进化系统中发现的稳健性和适应性的主要决定因素。虽然简并性对生物灵活性的贡献有据可查，但很少有关于在系统工程中实现灵活性的简并性设计原则的研究。实际上，在工程设计中通常会消除可能导致退化的条件。以运输车队的规划为案例研究，本文报告的证据表明，退化提高了模拟车队对任务要求的不可预测变化的稳健性和适应性，而不会产生车队效率的成本。我们发现简并支持更快的设计适应率，并最终导致更好的车队设计。在研究退化作为设计原则的局限性时，我们考虑了退化对舰队复杂性的影响所引起的决策困难。虽然全局决策变得更具挑战性，但我们还发现简并性可以适应快速分布式决策，从而实现（接近最优）稳健的系统性能。