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

粮食不安全是指缺乏持续和可靠的途径获得积极、健康生活所需的营养食物。这是得克萨斯州哈里斯县的一个严重问题，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，这一问题被进一步放大。目前尚不清楚休斯顿弱势群体的营养需求将如何在飓风和洪水、COVID-19、经济中断和系统性粮食不安全等多重灾害中得到解决。休斯顿食品银行（HFB）服务于大休斯顿地区，并与1，500多个合作伙伴合作，以解决面临粮食不安全的家庭的需求。备灾和救灾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大流行进一步对本组织的资金和人员造成压力。虽然HFB已经吸收和适应了过去的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能力建设战略。因此，HFB和其他此类区域粮食银行迫切需要开发和利用决策支持系统，以智能方式帮助灾害准备，响应和绩效评估。该项目的目标是通过开发和部署方法和技术系统，使粮食银行能够充分做好灾害准备，响应受影响社区的需求，并评估其在灾害期间的表现，从而提高非营利粮食银行供应链的复原力。该规划补助金涉及为部署以研究为中心的社会技术项目制定详细计划，以开发和实施决策工具，促进HFB和参与食品分配的非营利机构之间的综合灾害规划。具体目标是：（1）设计机构复原力指标，并利用不同的普查数据在低汇总水平（例如，CDC社会脆弱性指数）和HFB的客户网络，（2）为HFB设计一个多层复杂网络，包括上游和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）设计当天隐私的收集-通过潜在中断的通信基础设施保护服务不足和弱势群体的数据。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的学术价值和更广泛的影响审查标准。

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.