Harnessing Operational Systems Engineering to Support Peacebuilding

Report of a Workshop by the National Academy of Engineering and United States Institute of Peace Roundtable on Technology, Science, and Peacebuilding
Presents the summary of a workshop convened in November 2012 by the Roundtable on Science, Technology, and Peacebuilding of the National Academy of Engineering and the United States Institute of Peace.
Operational systems engineering is a methodology that identifies the important components of a complex system, analyzes the relationships among those components, and creates models of the system to explore its behavior and possible ways of changing that behavior. In this way it offers quantitative and qualitative techniques to support the design, analysis, and governance of systems of diverse scale and complexity for the delivery of products or services. Many peacebuilding interventions function essentially as the provision of services in response to demands elicited from societies in crisis.