Icosystem receives Phase I SBIR award
Icosystem Corporation Press Release
ONR-sponsored project to study personnel management

Icosystem Corporation was selected for award on a Phase I SBIR supported by the Office of Naval Research (ONR). The award supports a project titled "Agent-based Simulation of Shipboard Manpower & Personnel (M&P) Behaviors."

"We are very pleased to have been selected for award for this project" said Eric Bonabeau, Icosystem's founder and Chief Scientific Officer. "We have already demonstrated the power of agent-based modeling (ABM) as a tool for workforce management in several commercial projects. This ONR-sponsored project enables us to prove that it is feasible to use ABM to help the Navy understand and improve its Manpower and Personnel policies."

"ABM makes it possible to simulate all aspects of the life of a sailor, from recruitment to retirement" said Paolo Gaudiano, Icosystem's VP of Technology and Business Development. "By creating a bottom-up model of sailors in the Navy, we are able to address a broad range of personnel-related issues, such as recruitment policies, retention mechanisms, allocation to perform tasks on ships, and even sailor frustration and workload."

"Another important benefit for us is that the same tools that we will develop for the Navy could be easily applied to help large corporations manage all aspects of their personnel. While the details differ, the concepts of recruitment, incentives, workforce allocation and employee frustration apply equally well in the military and in the private sector."

The award is for a standard Phase I SBIR, which is expected to last up to 9 months for a total amount of up to $100,000.

About Icosystem Corporation

Icosystem Corporation, a strategy consulting firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has emerged as a leader in the development of business applications for network theory and complexity science. Using the tools of complexity science and advanced computational techniques, Icosystem provides a highly flexible and cost-effective technology platform for exploring business problems and discovering or designing strategies that have significant impact. Icosystem's approach uses realistic models of complex business environments and evolutionary and distributed computational techniques to validate new business ventures or improve the performance of existing enterprises.