The key goal of the Technical Committee on Conflict Resolution is to provide a forum for discussing, promoting, and disseminating research in the development and application of formal approaches to conflict resolution and risk analysis in systems management. The word Conflict implies that multiple participants or agents having different viewpoints or value systems are part of the societal, natural or technological system, or system of systems, being studied. The term Risk means that these decision makers are participating in a systems problem in which cooperative and competitive behavior could result in great opportunities or detrimental results for one or more of the stakeholders. The phrase Systems Management refers to the design, operation, and maintenance of systems from conflict and risk perspectives that could fall within Environmental (natural world), Societal (real life), Intelligent (artificial life), and Integrated (mixed life) Systems.

Figure 1 emphasizes that conflict and risk constitute inherent features of societal, natural and technological systems inhabited by multiple agents who practice a range of risk behavior. Examples of environmental systems include hydrological, atmospheric, zoological, botanical, ecological and geological systems. Societal systems comprise the rich variety of activities carried out by human beings for serving both individuals and groups of people. Illustrations of societal systems include economical, political, agricultural, industrial, governmental, infrastructure, and urban systems. Innovative humans and organizations within societal systems design, construct and maintain intelligent systems, such as robotic, mechatronic, and automated production systems, for satisfying human demands and needs. Integrated systems, like humans and software agents bidding for products over the Internet using eBay, constitute a combination of societal and intelligent systems. In fact, a large electrical generation and distribution network forms a mixed system because power generation facilities should automatically shut down and detach themselves from the power transmission grid when sensors detect huge power surges. The great power black-out of August 14, 2003, that took place in the North Eastern United States and the Canadian Province of Ontario, illustrates how the negative side of risk can emerge as a result of poor systems management, conflict of interest, and lack of proper risk assessment.

Since 1991, members of the Technical Committee on Conflict Resolution have been organizing the evolving track of sessions on Conflict and Risk Analysis in Systems Management at the annual conferences of the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society. At the track of sessions, authors deliver a wide variety of intriguing papers encompassing the latest developments of Systems Methodologies for tackling challenging systems management issues arising in many different kinds of systems that fall within and across the systems portrayed in the figure. Examples of the types of Systems Methodologies that are presented and applied to these systems include conflict resolution, risk assessment, multiple criteria decision analysis, risk communication, stochastic modeling, fuzzy logic, information-gap, time series analysis, optimization, neural network, systems engineering, and probabilistic operation research tools. Members also assisted in preparing a special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C, (Vol. 33, No. 1, 2003), published in Honor of the late Professor Madan G. Singh.