A conceptual and architectural characterization of antifragile systems

Antifragility is one of the terms that have recently emerged with the aim of indicating a direction that should be pursued toward the objective of designing Information and Communications Technology systems that remain trustworthy despite their dynamic and evolving operating context. We present a characterization of antifragility, aiming to clarify from a conceptual viewpoint the implications of its adoption as a design guideline and its relationships with other approaches sharing a similar objective. To this end, we discuss the inclusion of antifragility (and related concepts) within the well-known dependability taxonomy, which was proposed a few decades ago with the goal of providing a reference framework to reason about the different facets of the general concern of designing dependable systems. From our conceptual characterization, we then derive a possible path toward the engineering of antifragile systems.