Extracting the essence of flexibility in system design

The modest purpose of this paper is to review the concept of flexibility as discussed in various fields of investigations, and to extract its characteristic features. In order to discuss any subject matter clearly, it is necessary to begin with a clear set of definitions. Indeed much can be gained through careful and consistent definitions of terms alone. Flexibility however is a word rich with ambiguity. While it is being increasingly used in various fields, few attempts have been made to formally define, quantify and propose ways for achieving flexibility. This paper proposes to fill in part this gap by synthesizing a clear and consistent definition of flexibility. It will do so by reviewing the usage of the term in various fields of inquiries, and show that it is indeed possible to clearly and unambiguously characterize flexibility and to disentangle it from closely related concepts.