Welcome to the Civil Systems Program Website

A system is a set of two or more elements whose behavior is interdependent and interactive. The focus of this program is the emerging complexity in civilian systems such as workflow networks, smart buildings, unmanned air vehicles, biofilms, infrastructure security, organic disaster management networks, and sustainable eco-systems. Such systems often have a "personality" that cannot be perfectly predicted from an analysis of their parts. This is often true for the large systems that form the infrastructure of our society, but it is also true of much smaller systems we design, build and use every day. The elements comprising a system can include the following:

(1) hardware (structures, equipment, facilities),
(2) software and procedures (formal, informal),
(3) environments (ecological, biological, physical, computational),
(4) people
(5) organizations (social, political, financial), and
(6) interfaces among the preceding.

For more information on the Civil Systems program, please explore the menu items above, or read our Civil Systems Manifesto.

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