Self-Directed Learning, A Guide for Learners and Teachers

OR/MS research in disaster operations management

A Study of Teams: How It All Began The Apollo Syndrome Teams Containing Similar Personalities Identifying further Team Roles Team Leadership The Missing Team Roles Developing an inventory Unsuccessful teams Winning teams Ideal team size Features of good members of a team Teams in Public Affairs How Belbin reports developed Case Studies in Using Belbin

Management teams: Why they succeed or fail

Human Development Report 2001: making new technologies work for human development

지각된 유용성(Perceived Usefulness)의 영향분석

Environmental emergency situations can differ in many ways, for instance according to their causes and the dimension of their impacts. Yet, they share the characteristic of sudden onset and the necessity for a coherent and effective emergency management. In this paper we consider decision support in the event of a nuclear or radiological accident in Europe. RODOS, an acronym for real-time on-line decision support system, is a decision support system designed to provide support from the early phases through to the medium and long-term phases. This work highlights the role of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) within RODOS in ensuring the transparency of decision processes within emergency and remediation management. Special emphasis is placed on the evaluation of alternative remediation or countermeasure strategies using the multi-criteria decision support tool Web-HIPRE in scenario focused decision making workshops involving different stakeholder and expert groups. Decision support is enhanced by a module that generates natural language explanations to facilitate the understanding of the evaluation process, therefore contributing to the direct involvement of the decision makers, with the aim of increasing their confidence in the results of the analyses carried out, forming an audit trail for the decision making process and improving the acceptability of the system as a whole.

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Multi-criteria decision support and evaluation of strategies for nuclear remediation management

Intelligent Decision Support Systems (DSSs) use expert systems technology to enhance the capabilities of decision makers (DMs) in understanding a decision problem and selecting a sound alternative. Because of the people-centred focus of such technologies, it is important not only to assess their technical aspects and overall performance but also to seek the views of potential users. This paper draws from the literature to classify methods for assessing intelligent Decision Support Systems and discusses our experiences in developing, operating and evaluating an intelligent decision support system for nuclear emergencies. The system assists decision makers in the formulation and ranking of alternatives and communicates its recommendation in a natural language form. The application highlights insights from the development process and shortcomings of existing assessment methods. Lessons learned from the study, challenges encountered and recommendations for future practices are discussed.

Design and evaluation of an intelligent decision support system for nuclear emergencies

This paper describes a method for generating explanations in decision analytic contexts. Unlike other approaches, we use natural language generation techniques. The novelty of the work stems from the development of a library of text plans that structure the explanation messages conveyed. This makes our approach generic and easily adjusted to different contexts. In order to demonstrate the applicability of the method, we have developed a natural language generator that explains and justifies the advice of a decision support system for nuclear emergencies. The generator outputs two reports: a comparative report that explains the rationale behind the ranking of the alternatives and a sensitivity analysis report that gives an overall assessment of the decision model and describes the effect of varying a decision parameter.

Explaining and justifying the advice of a decision support system: a natural language generation approach

Decision workshops, sometimes called decision conferences, help a group of decision makers gain a shared understanding of a decision problem, analyse issues and commit to an action plan under the guidance of an experienced facilitator. This work seeks to identify best practice in the early stages of the facilitation of such workshops when the emphasis is placed on problem structuring and the main issues of a complex decision problem are identified and explored. Four decision workshops, based on the same hypothetical scenario but facilitated by a different person, were organized. Video material of the simulated workshops was analysed to compare and contrast the facilitated meetings including the problem structuring methods used. A framework for studying facilitation practices emerged. The effect of a facilitator on the structuring of the problem, the group decision process and the outcome of the workshop was studied. The results of the work indicate that a facilitator's style and approach to the workshop may have an impact on the action plan devised. Further research is required to generalize the findings of our work.

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Facilitation practices in decision workshops

In the thirteen years that have elapsed since the Chernobyl accident, many studies and developments have been made with the aim of improving our response to any future accident. One project has been the development of a decision support system to aid emergency management. rodos, a Real time online Decision support system for nuclear emergency management, has been built by a consortium of many institutes across Europe and the cis. As it approaches (standby!) operational use, we face the task of tailoring the output to meet the specific needs of users and simultaneously opening up their minds to full potential of a modern decision support system (dss). This paper reports a number of investigations into the decision support needs of the competent national safety authorities and reflects on the implications of rodos for the emergency management process.

K N Papamichail

Papers

Multi-criteria decision support and evaluation of strategies for nuclear remediation management

Design and evaluation of an intelligent decision support system for nuclear emergencies

Explaining and justifying the advice of a decision support system: a natural language generation approach

Facilitation practices in decision workshops

Rodos: Decision Support for Nuclear Emergencies