The ICIS partners believe that the search for techniques and methods that help to build information systems with intelligent behaviour is one of the most critical areas in future information systems research. Among the requirements for these systems are capabilities to help the human actors to (pre)process ever increasing amounts of digital and digitized information and search for relevance, meaning and importance, support a chain of activities (rather than a single function) that is focused on reaching a set of goals by acting on both the system and the environment in which the system operates, be able to auto-detect and cope with changes both in the environment, the system and in the goals, and support reasoning with uncertainty, reasoning with risks and reasoning under a lack of knowledge, necessary because of the chaotic nature of the real world.

As an overall architecture for ICIS-type systems, the project will use a new paradigm.
In particular, ICIS systems will use Actor-Agent Communities, a particular type of complex system, involving the collaboration of multiple human and artificial agents for the realization of a common mission.

The ICIS project will use a focus on one particular application domain to ensure that with a relatively limited amount of effort over a restricted period of time, a noticeable and recognizable impact of ICIS technology on society can be realized. These results however, can be used in other domains of application. In particular ICIS application domains are characterized by real-time decision making in complex, dynamic and chaotic environments.