Product Herding for Intelligent Systems

The endogenous evolution of intelligent systems exposes insufficiencies in some systems engineering activities that rely on exogenous properties of systems. One of these activities is product lining for manufacturing identical systems. In this paper, we argue that manufacturing intelligent systems using product lines engenders several problems with respect to systems engineering practices. As an alternative to product lining, we propose a new framework called product herding that recognizes and attempts to manage the tendency of intelligent systems to develop idiosyncratic features as they are fielded.