POW-ER: Computational Modeling of C2 Organizations and Processes

Through collaboration with colleagues at Stanford University, the Edge Center has developed extensive experience with POW-ER (Projects, Organizations and Work for Edge Research), an environment for computational modeling of organizations and processes. POW-ER enables one to model, simulate and analyze the comparative performance of alternate organization designs--including different organization structures, work processes, technologies and personnel--in a virtual environment. This enables the comparative strengths and weaknesses of competing organization designs to be identified and analyzed, very quickly, in advance of making decisions to commit or change to any one or another. Hence it can inform the organization leader and policy maker to an unprecedented degree.

Building upon two decades of research in this area by the Virtual Design Team Research Group at Stanford, POW-ER extends a well-understood and empirically validated computational modeling environment that has been applied effectively in dozens of industrial settings. Now, through research at the Naval Postgraduate School, this POW-ER environment has been adapted for use in the C2, intelligence and other domains.

If you would like to learn more about POW-ER and its use to model and analyze organization design approaches, then please see the corresponding papers included in the Work Products area of this website. We welcome opportunities to work with people interested in modeling operational organizations and processes in the field, and will be happy to help establish and coordinate a shared library of models.

To request the software, please email us at cep_info <at> nps.edu.

Download the documentation.