Over the past 20 years, with many researchers’ efforts, System Adaptability research results have been converging, becoming more mature, and being more often used in Systems Engineering especially in system trade studies. The basic result summary is available in SEBoK (https://sebokwiki.org/wiki/System_Adaptability ).



However, many needs from other disciplines to address adaptability in their contexts are not being met.  But there is a universal desire to have adaptable system designs, for example in many working groups in their attempts to make systems adaptable (to changes) and more sustainable.



The INCOSE System Adaptability Working Group (AdaptWG) will operate to help promoting public knowledge sharing to address the needs for adaptable systems and related issues from other disciplines of Systems Engineering.  Applicable topic areas include adaptability usages in risk management (Risk Management workgroup) and procurement (PM-SE workgroup), uncertain requirement captures in agile process (Agile workgroup, Systems of Systems workgroup), adaptable career development (social science effort), extended service lives (sustainability effort), and in fundamental or core theory for Systems Engineering (SE Fundamentals workstream in FuSE). 



As summarized in the SEBoK, adaptability is related with several other concepts which are not the same as adaptability.  For example, flexible design (largely developed in industrial engineering) often requires up-front investment and justification of redundant designs, while system adaptability factor potential changes into current design choices for reduction of unnecessarily redundant designs.  Resilience focuses on reactions triggered by adverse events (https://sebokwiki.org/wiki/System_Resilience ) while adaptability focuses on solutions for changes caused by either adversarial or beneficial events.  Reuses sometimes help adaptability which however has its clear quantification for tradeoffs without high upfront investment.