Today’s vehicles are systems made by engineering projects, not platforms. A system describes the whole interaction between containing components with a clear set of rules. Platforms instead focus on semantics as given by APIs. Let’s compare it with processes and its management. With classical process management every condition is sketched in all its variances. In comparison approaches such as adaptive case management reduce the scope of consideration. Every case is atomically described by its triggering data and emitted data. The variances are implicitly instead of explicitly described, allowing to apply heuristics.
Heuristics based on well known semantics could take over the role of rules covering all variances. Heuristics solve problems by making quick and efficient judgments. In its core, it is all about complexity reduction by understanding the problem context – also called domain knowledge. In example the gaze heuristic solving the question of catching a ball from the air with one variable. A catcher has to keep the angle between its eye and the ball constant adapting its own speed. All other variables such as wind speed, present ball speed, initial throwing angle, etc. are not important to solve the problem. Instead of applying computation performance and mathematics, it applies knowledge. Knowledge allowing to do a dimensional reduction, make the solution space controllable.