The BSIK project ICIS is positioned to launch the Dutch knowledge and technology platform on Interactive Collaborative Information Systems (ICIS). The results will provide support for collaborative decision-making in dynamic environments such as crisis management, traffic management, healthcare and other critical environments in which the dynamics may turn a stable situation into a chaotic affair.

In many cases the need has been expressed for novel approaches to handle the complexity in these domains. Because of the integral connectedness of the world around us, local decisions inevitably have wide ramifications. Decisions that seem optimal at a local level may be harmful on a global level. It is obvious that decision making in time critical circumstances is challenging – especially when many actors and sources of information are involved.

Supporting collaborative decisions under these conditions evidently requires concrete technologies involving multiple disciplines. Our general assumption is that an intelligent layer of agent-based systems can serve human actors to improve handling complexity under critical circumstances. Our research is concerned with a number of key issues. First, decisions are crucially dependent on the awareness of the environment of all participants (artificial and human) who are involved in the process. Second, a variety of supporting means is required for making decisions in a community of many human actors, artificial agents and (legacy) information systems. Third, if actors and agents must collaborate the quality of human-system interaction is a critical success factor. Finally an overarching actor-agent community (AAC) system architecture is necessary to enable integration of the many autonomous agencies. These issues define the four research clusters of the ICIS project:

• Enhanced Situation Awareness (ESA),
• Collaborative Decision Making (CDM),
• Computational Human Interaction Modeling (CHIM) and
• ICIS-Architectures (ICIS-A).