A roadmap for a comprehensive treatment of issues of flexibility in system design is developed that addresses the following questions: 1) What are the characteristic features of flexibility in system design? Can one clearly and unambiguously characterize flexibility, and disentangle it from closely related concepts? 2) What drives the need for flexibility in system design, and what are the attributes of an environment in which flexible designs should be sought and fielded? 3) How can one embed flexibility in a system design? 4) What are the trade-offs associated with designing for flexibility? What is the value of flexibility and what are the associated penalties (cost, performance, risk, etc.), if any? These are the fundamental questions around which this thesis revolves. The first part of this work addresses the first two questions: Flexibility of a design is here defined as the property of a system that allows it to respond to changes in its initial objectives and requirements-both in terms of capabilities and attributes-occurring after the system has been fielded, i.e., is in operation, in a timely and cost-effective way. It is argued that flexibility should be sought when: 1) the uncertainty in a system's environment is such that there is a need to mitigate market risks, in the case of a commercial venture, and reduce a design's exposure to uncertainty in its environment, 2) the system's technology base evolves on a time scale considerably shorter than the system's design lifetime, thus requiring a solution for mitigating risks associated with technology obsolescence.
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