Website: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0624219&HistoricalAwards=false
NSF Grant: 0624219
Investigators
- Andrea Tapia, Penn State University (Principal Investigator)
- Carleen Maitland (Former Principal Investigator)
- John Yen, Penn State university (Co-Principal Investigator)
- Benita Beamon (Co-Principal Investigator)
Description
Highly complex decision making involving multiple organizations, which have both shared and private interests, pose many challenges in the critical area of disaster relief as well as for organizational scholars. In particular, it is difficult to understand how the structure, distribution of decision rights, and governance of a multi-organization coordination body influences decision-making processes and outcomes. Also, systematic assessment of the effects of improved decision making for related activities, such as the provision of goods in a supply chain, presents a significant challenge. This research addressed these problems in the context of decision making for information and communication technology (ICT) coordination in humanitarian relief. This continues to be an area exemplified by the communication failures in the relief effort for.
This multi-disciplinary research project integrated software-based intelligent agent research on information sharing and decision making with a study of organization designs that influence information sharing, and analytic assessments of the industry-level performance improvements resulting from improved decision making. The coordination bodies in this study are the International Working Group for Emergency Capacity Building (IWG ECB), consisting of representatives from the largest international humanitarian relief agencies, including CARE, Oxfam and Save the Children, among others, and HumaniNet, consisting of primarily smaller agencies. Data gathered from these organizations using qualitative methods, will then be used to modify an agent-based architecture to perform sensitivity analyses of the effects of these designs on decision-making, generating recommendations for improved designs. Subsequently, the outputs of the simulation were used in analytic models to predict the effects of decision-making improvements on disaster relief supply chain performance. Together, our research on decision-making contributed knowledge in the critical area of disaster relief, while making fundamental advancements to theories of organization science, artificial intelligence and logistics.
Publications
Maitland, C.F. and Tapia, A.. “Coordinated ICTs for Effective Use in Humanitarian Assistance,” The Journal of Information Technology in Social Change, v.1, 2007, p. 128-141.
Balcik, Burcu and Benita M. Beamon. “Facility Location in Humanitarian Relief,” International Journal of Logistics: Research and Applications, v.11, 2008, p. 101 – 121.
Zhao, K., Yen, J., Ngamassi, L., Maitland, C., and Tapia, A.. “Modeling Emerging Coalitions in the context of Inter-organizational Networks: A Case Study of Humanitarian Coordination,” International Journal of Intelligent Control and Systems Research, v.14, 2009, p. 97.
Zhao, K., Yen, J, Ngamassi, L., Maitland, C., & Tapia, A.. “Modeling Emerging Coalitions in the context of Inter-organizational Networks: A Case Study of Humanitarian Coordination,” International Journal of Intelligent Control and Systems (IJICS),, v.14, 2009, p. 97.
Yen, J., Maitland, C. and Tapia, A.. “Simulated Decision Making for ICT Coordination in Disaster Relief Using Cognitive Agents”, 01/01/2007-12/31/2007, 2007, “AI in ICT for Development – Workshop at IJCAI, Twentieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Hyderabad, India”.
Pusey, B. and C. Maitland, A. Tapia and J. Yen. “A Survey of Trust Models in Agent Applications”, 01/01/2007-12/31/2007, 2007, “Annual Conference of the ?North American Association for Computational Social and Organizational Sciences (NAACSOS)”.
Yen, J., Maitland, C. and Tapia, A.. “Simulated Decision Making for ICT Coordination in Disaster Relief Using Cognitive Agents”, 01/01/2008-12/31/2008, 2007, “AI in ICT for Development – Workshop at IJCAI, Twentieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Hyderabad, India”.