Integrated Systems Modeling Program

Program overview

The Integrated Systems Modeling Program (ISMP) maintains the Integrated Civilizational Systems Model (ICSM), the Department’s principal analytical instrument for studying how failures propagate among interdependent global systems. The Program is led by the Office of Strategic Risk Assessment, with the Office of Advanced Artificial Intelligence contributing the Computational Systems and AI module and the Office of Long-Term Systems Research contributing scenario design and uncertainty methods.

ICSM couples 11 modules: Energy; Food and Agriculture; Water; Climate and Environment; Finance and Trade; Supply Chain and Manufacturing; Information and Communications; Computational Systems and AI; Public Health; Governance and Social Cohesion; and Demography. Each module represents its domain at a level of detail sufficient to capture the dependencies that matter for systemic risk, and no more. The model’s purpose is not to forecast any single system precisely but to identify configurations in which stress in one system can propagate to others faster than institutions can respond.

The model’s headline metric is the Composite Systemic Stress Index (CSSI), scaled from 0 to 100. Historical calibration places the index at about 31 in 2000, 38 in 2010 and 46 in 2020; the 2026 nowcast is about 54. A CSSI of 70 or above sustained for 24 months is defined as the systemic breakdown regime. ICSM version 4.0 was baselined in April 2026 and documented in DSC-TR-2026-003. Version 4.2, used for the Civilizational Systems Outlook: 2026–2035, was run as an ensemble of 40,000 runs across 1,280 scenario configurations on ALPHA-1 at Facility Alpha.

The Department’s models indicate that in 71 percent of ensemble runs (central estimate; 90 percent interval 58–82 percent) the CSSI enters the breakdown regime before 1 January 2035. This is a model result with substantial uncertainty, not a prediction of a specific event, and the Model Review Panel recorded two dissenting opinions concerning calibration of the Governance module. The Program treats those dissents as part of the record and as priorities for its own work. A plain-language account of the assessment is available on the risk assessment page.

Research objectives

1. Maintain ICSM as a documented, version-controlled and independently reviewable model, with every published result traceable to a specific version and configuration.
2. Improve calibration of individual modules against historical data, beginning with the Governance and Social Cohesion module in response to Model Review Panel findings.
3. Characterize the coupling pathways through which stress propagates between modules, as set out in DSC-TR-2026-010.
4. Produce the Civilizational Systems Outlook series and the CSSI nowcast on a regular cycle.
5. Quantify and communicate uncertainty in every published projection, including structural uncertainty arising from model design choices.
6. Support the Model Review Panel by providing full access to code, inputs and run records.

Current research areas

Select a research area to read a summary of current work.