A Quantitative Approach to Assessing System Evolvability

When selecting a system j?om multiple candidates, the customer seeks the one that best meets his or her needs. Recently the desire for evolvable systems has become more important and engineers are striving to develop systems that accommodate this need. In response to this search for evolvabili@, we present a historical perspective on evolvability, propose a refined definition of evolvabiliy, and develop a quantitative method for measuring this property. We address this quantitative methodology from both a theoretical and practical perspective. This quantitative model is then applied to the problem of evolving a lunar mission to a Mars mission as a case study.