DRU: Inter-organizational Decision Making and Organization Design for Improved ICT Coordination in Disaster Relief

DRU：改善救灾信息通信技术协调的组织间决策和组织设计

• 批准号: 0624219
• 负责人: Andrea Tapia
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Pennsylvania State Univ University Park
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2007
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2007-01-01 至 2011-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0624219&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: DRU; Inter; organizational; Decision; Making

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 will address these problems in the context of decision making for information and communication technology (ICT) coordination in humanitarian relief, an area which, as exemplified by the communication failures in the relief effort for hurricane Katrina, requires significant attention.This multi-disciplinary research project integrates 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 who will participate 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 will be used in analytic models to predict the effects of decision making improvements on disaster relief supply chain performance. Together, our research on decision making will contribute badly needed knowledge in the critical area of disaster relief, while making fundamental advancements to theories of organization science, artificial intelligence and logistics.

高度复杂的决策涉及多个组织，其中既有共同的和私人的利益，提出了许多挑战，在救灾的关键领域，以及组织学者。特别是，很难理解多组织协调机构的结构、决策权分配和治理如何影响决策过程和结果。此外，系统评估改进决策对相关活动的影响，如供应链中的货物供应，也是一项重大挑战。这项研究将在人道主义救济中信息和通信技术协调的决策背景下解决这些问题，正如卡特里娜飓风救济工作中的通信故障所证明的那样，这个多学科的研究项目整合了软件-基于智能代理的信息共享与决策研究，研究了影响信息共享的组织设计，以及对改进决策所带来的行业级绩效改进的分析评估。参加这项研究的协调机构是国际应急能力建设工作组，由最大的国际人道主义救济机构的代表组成，其中包括援外社、牛津救济会和拯救儿童等，以及人道网，主要由较小的机构组成。使用定性方法从这些组织收集的数据，然后将用于修改基于代理的架构，以执行这些设计对决策的影响的敏感性分析，生成改进设计的建议。随后，模拟的结果将用于分析模型，以预测决策改进对救灾供应链绩效的影响。总之，我们对决策的研究将有助于在救灾的关键领域急需的知识，同时使组织科学，人工智能和物流理论的根本性进步。