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

粮食不安全是指无法持续可靠地获得积极健康生活所需的营养食品。在德克萨斯州的哈里斯县，这是一个严重的问题，到2020年初，超过14%的家庭和23%的儿童处于粮食不安全状态。在最近的破坏性事件中，包括飓风哈维和冠状病毒（COVID-19）大流行，这一问题进一步加剧。目前尚不清楚在飓风和洪水、2019冠状病毒病、经济中断和系统性粮食不安全等多重灾害中，休斯顿弱势群体的营养需求将如何得到满足。休斯顿食品银行（HFB）服务于大休斯顿地区，并与1500多个合作伙伴合作，解决经历食品不安全的家庭的需求。灾难准备和应对决策主要基于不完整的数据、人类直觉和咨询公司的无偿投入。COVID-19大流行进一步给该组织的资金和人员带来压力。虽然HFB过去已经吸收并适应了洪水事件和其他灾害，但它设想进行组织转型，以参与超越当前实践的复原力建设战略。因此，HFB和其他地区食品银行迫切需要开发和利用决策支持系统，以智能地帮助灾害准备、响应和绩效评估。如果不加以解决，紧急粮食安全供应链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方法和技术系统，使食品银行能够为灾害做好充分准备，响应受影响社区的需求，并在灾害期间评估其绩效，从而提高非营利食品银行供应链的弹性。这项计划拨款包括准备一份详细的计划，用于部署一个以研究为中心的社会技术项目，以开发和实施决策工具，促进HFB和参与食品分发的非营利机构之间的综合灾害规划。具体目标是：(1)使用不同的人口普查数据在低聚集水平（例如CDC社会脆弱性指数）和HFB的客户网络设计组织弹性指标和食物公平需求映射；(2)为HFB设计一个多层复杂的网络，包括上下游的相互依赖关系；(3)使用计算博弈论和深度强化学习设计灾害管理决策工具。(4)设计在通信基础设施可能中断的情况下，从服务不足和弱势群体中收集当天的隐私保护数据。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.