SCC-CIVIC-PG Track B: Equitable Food-Security: Disaster-resilient supply chains for pandemics and extreme weather events

SCC-CIVIC-PG 轨道 B：公平粮食安全：应对流行病和极端天气事件的抗灾供应链

• 批准号: 2043988
• 负责人: Ioannis Kakadiaris
• 金额: $ 5万
• 依托单位: University of Houston
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2021-01-15 至 2022-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2043988&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SCC; CIVIC; PG; Track; Equitable

Food insecurity is the lack of consistent and reliable access to nutritious food needed for an active, healthy life. It is a significant problem in Harris County, Texas, where over 14% of households and 23% of children were food insecure at the beginning of 2020. This problem has been further magnified during recent devastating events, including Hurricane Harvey and the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. It is unclear how the nutritional needs of Houston's vulnerable populations will be addressed amidst multiple disasters, including hurricanes and flooding, COVID-19, economic disruptions, and systemic food insecurity. The Houston Food Bank (HFB) serves the Greater Houston area and collaborates with over 1,500 partners to address families' needs experiencing food insecurity. Disaster preparation and response decisions have been mainly based on incomplete data, human intuition, and pro-bono input from consulting firms. The COVID-19 pandemic has further induced stresses on the organization’s funding and personnel. While the HFB has absorbed and adapted to flooding events and other disasters in the past, it envisions organizational transformation to engage in resilience-building strategies that go beyond current practice. Thus, there is an urgent and critical need for HFB and other such regional food banks to develop and utilize decision support systems that intelligently aid in disaster preparation, response, and performance measurement. Unaddressed, emergency food security supply chains are unlikely to ensure efficient, equitable, and effective distribution of food and related resources.The project’s goal is to improve the resilience of nonprofit food banks’ supply chains by developing and deploying methods and technology systems that enable food banks to fully prepare for disasters, respond to the needs of the communities impacted, and evaluate their performance during disasters. This planning grant involves the preparation of a detailed plan for the deployment of a research-centered socio-technical project to develop and implement decision-making tools that will facilitate integrated disaster planning between HFB and nonprofit agencies involved in food distribution. The specific objectives are to (1) Design organizational resilience indicators and mapping of food equity needs using different census data at low levels of aggregation (e.g., the CDC Social Vulnerability Index) and HFB’s client network, (2) Design a multilayer, complex network for HFB, consisting of interdependencies both upstream and downstream, (3) Design decision-making tools for disaster management using computational game theory and deep reinforcement learning, and (4) Design the collection of same-day privacy-preserving data from underserved and vulnerable populations over a potentially disrupted communication infrastructure.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

粮食不安全是缺乏一致且可靠地获得积极，健康生活所需的营养食品。这是德克萨斯州哈里斯县的一个重大问题，在2020年初，超过14％的家庭和23％的儿童是不安全的。在最近的毁灭性事件中，包括哈维飓风和冠状病毒（Covid-19）在包括飓风（COVID-19）中进一步放大了这个问题。目前尚不清楚休斯顿脆弱人群的营养需求如何在多次灾难中解决，包括飓风和洪水，Covid-19，经济中断和系统性的粮食不安全感。休斯顿食品银行（HFB）为大休斯顿地区提供服务，并与1,500多名合作伙伴合作，以满足家庭经历粮食不安全的需求。灾难准备和响应决策主要是基于咨询公司的不完整数据，人类直觉和亲理通投入。 COVID-19大流行进一步引起了组织资金和人员的压力。虽然HFB过去吸收并适应了洪水事件和其他灾难，但它设想组织转型以制定超越当前实践的弹性建设策略。这是HFB和其他此类地区食品银行的迫切需求，以开发和利用决策支持系统，以智能帮助灾难准备，反应和绩效衡量。未解决的紧急食品安全供应连锁店不太可能确保粮食和相关资源的高效，公平和有效分配。该项目的目标是通过开发和部署食品银行能够充分准备灾难做好准备，对他们在效果上的需求做出充分准备，并评估其在效果上的效果，并在效果上响应，并通过开发和部署食品银行来提高非营利性食品银行供应链的韧性。该计划赠款涉及准备以研究为中心的社会技术项目的详细计划，以开发和实施决策工具，以促进HFB与参与食品分配的非营利机构之间的综合灾难计划。特定目标是（1）设计组织的弹性指标和食品公平需求的映射，使用低级别的聚集水平（例如CDC社会脆弱性指数）和HFB的客户网络的不同人口普查数据，（2）设计多层，用于HFB的复杂网络，既有灾难型和下属的工具（3），该工具既有灾难又有依赖性的工具（3）。 （4）设计从潜在的沟通基础架构中，从服务不足和脆弱人群中收集了当天隐私的数据。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并被认为是通过基金会的知识分子优点和更广泛的影响标准通过评估来评估的。