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Monterey Phoenix

Automated support for your natural reasoning ability.

Capture, communicate, and debug your mental model of how a given mission, system, or process works. Using your knowledge. In your words.

The MP Advantage

Monterey Phoenix (MP) is a user-friendly approach and tool to help you explore and understand complex systems, processes, or missions. With MP, you can:

  • Map out decisions and see their potential outcomes

  • Plan actions and predict their results

  • Identify risks, threats, and opportunities

  • Uncover hidden issues in your plans or systems

  • Shape prompts for Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools

Why Use MP?

MP helps you think smarter and plan better by:

  • Turning your ideas into clear, easy-to-read diagrams

  • Showing every possible way a process could unfold based on your rules

  • Helping you spot mistakes, risks, or gaps in your thinking

  • Making powerful analysis tools accessible without needing a technical degree

  • Revealing overlooked risks, assumptions, or exceptions

  • Strengthening your strategies, workflows, or systems against challenges

Reason with Confidence

MP is designed for technical as well as non-technical users:

  • Easy to Use: Describe your process in a straightforward language—no advanced skills needed

  • Complete Analysis: Automatically generate all possible outcomes for your system design

  • Clear Visuals: Create intuitive diagrams to share with your team

  • Informed Decisions: Check for specific issues and measure risks, costs, and time

  • Quantified Results: Summarize findings with reports, charts, and tables

Real-World Impact

MP has been transforming how teams plan and analyze behavior since 2015:

  • Used by Naval commands, defense agencies, and national labs

  • Supported by free or open source tools like MP-Firebird and MP-Gryphon

  • Uncovered surprising insights in systems across many fields

  • Works with modern system design standards such as Systems Modeling Language (SysML)

Get Started with MP

Ready to plan for emergence and make better decisions? MP empowers you to design complex systems and processes that do what you want, and not what you don't.

Self-Paced Courses

MP 101: Basic Behavior Modeling

  • Course
  • 1 Lesson

Get started! Learn what behavior is and why it is a central design consideration. Express a small number of rules that produce examples of intended or actual behavior for your mission, system, process, or workflow. In doing so, you will pick up the basics of the user-friendly MP language and produce clear, precise graphs to illustrate your thoughts to team members and decision makers.

Learn about the Monterey Phoenix Internship Program

Origins of Monterey Phoenix

Monterey Phoenix (MP) was developed at the U.S. Navy Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) by Dr. Mikhail Auguston in the Department of Computer Sciences. The engine behind MP is the result of decades of research and development.

© 2025 Kristin Giammarco