International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium


The International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium is one of the world's premier scientific conferences on topics related to Command and Control, from both a theoretical and practical point of view. It is the only major conference with C2 as its exclusive focus. The symposium has had papers not only on C2 in military contexts, but also in civilian ones such as disaster relief.
ICCRTS has been widely attended by scientists and practitioners from the United States and a number of NATO countries, most commonly Canada, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Turkey, but others as well. Regular participants have also come from Australia, Brazil, Finland, and Singapore.
The symposium publishes proceedings with full-length, peer-reviewed scientific papers.

Evolution and Current Status

ICCRTS began in the 1990s as a program within Command and Control Research Program funded by the United States Department of Defense.
Since 2015, the symposium has been operated by The International Command and Control Institute, which also maintains archives of its publications. A number of papers, particularly by U.S. authors, are also available to the public through the U.S. Defense Technical Information Center.
At its peak in 2009-2011 ICCRTS had several hundred participants. However, the loss of explicit funding support from the United States Department of Defense in 2015 nearly killed the symposium. That year it had to be cancelled, even though people had already written and submitted their papers. The papers were nevertheless published in the Proceedings, and since 2016 under the aegis of the IC2I, the symposium has bounced back and stabilized, although at lower levels of participation than it enjoyed between 2009 and 2011.

Details of Past Symposia

Note that in earlier years, two symposia were sometimes held: the international one, known as ICCRTS; and a U.S. domestic one, known as CCRTS. The first ICCRTS in 1995 was in the United States and was modest in size, with only a handful of non-U.S. participants. The 1996, 1997, and 1998 meetings were held in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Sweden, respectively.
Below are details of the meetings since 1999: