Recent trends toward urbanization decrease the effectiveness of the current military targeting cycle and challenge the military intelligence enterprise when innovative opportunists present themselves as terrorists within cities. The customer was seeking a new analytical methodology, unbound from state sovereignty presumptions, to understand and identify vulnerabilities that exist within the structure of cities so as to preempt innovative opportunists from disrupting social order.

QVine developed a system to collect publicly available information about cities of interest and analyze the complex adaptive social environments to identify where conflict is likely concentrated in the future. The system uses a visualization known to economists as the Production Possibility Frontier (PPF) where the X axis represents Capability of the City and the Y axis represents the Will of the City. A key assumption is the City seeks to grow and each of the sub-systems will attempt to migrate toward the point of optimal efficiency. The system is continually updated with new data, so users can also see the City evolution over time.