Towards a Conceptual Characterization of Antifragile Systems

Antifragility has recently emerged as a design principle for the realization of systems that remain trustworthy despite the occurrence of changes during their operations. In this "New Ideas" paper we intend to support the vision that an effective application of this principle requires a clear understanding of the implications of its adoption and of its relationships with other approaches sharing a similar objective. To this end, we argue that a proper conceptual characterization of antifragility can be achieved through its inclusion within the consolidated dependability taxonomy. From this conceptual characterization we identify open architectural challenges towards the definition of a reference model for antifragile systems.