Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Disaster Damage Categorization Applying Satellite Images And Machine Learning Algorithm, Farinaz Sabz Ali Pour, Adrian Gheorghe

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Special information has a significant role in disaster management. Land cover mapping can detect short- and long-term changes and monitor the vulnerable habitats. It is an effective evaluation to be included in the disaster management system to protect the conservation areas. The critical visual and statistical information presented to the decision-makers can help in mitigation or adaption before crossing a threshold. This paper aims to contribute in the academic and the practice aspects by offering a potential solution to enhance the disaster data source effectiveness. The key research question that the authors try to answer in this paper is how …

Natural Resources Governance Employing Blockchain-Based Decision-Making, Farinaz Sabz Ali Pour, Adrian Gheorghe

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Natural resources are essential structures of socio-economic systems which shape the well-being of humanity, environment, and the economy. Human actions have become the critical responsibility for environmental changes and pressuring many planetary boundaries. Having a systematic approach can provide a governance platform including the inherent characteristics of the resource, the historically established form of use, and transaction costs. A natural resource governance framework is developed by applying Blockchain technology as the primary goal of this study to regulate and manage the extraction and trades. Blockchain technology provides a distributed concurrency monitoring system for sustainable resource management. Persistent and pervasive cooperation …

Engineers' Motivation To Influence Public Decision Making: A Grounded Theory Approach, Sarah Bouazzaoui, Charles B. Daniels

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

In the United States of America, public policies and public decision making associated with the engineering field are set by individuals who does not possess expertise and knowledge to carry out these tasks [1]. Most of decision makers are lawyers and social scientists, not engineers [2]. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the various factors which either encourage or inhibit engineers from influencing and participating in public policy. In this study, a grounded theory approach will be followed, data will be collected using semi-structured interviews and analyzed to develop a theory of research direct toward increasing the motivation …

Diversity Team Building: Impact On Virtual Team Performance, Nina C. Magpili-Smith

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Although organizations have addressed diversity issues at the organizational-level with resulting positive employee outcomes, lack of scholarly attention to team-level interventions remain. Team-level interventions would benefit organizations more directly as they address issues directly related to task accomplishment. Since diversity may lead to negative performance results for teams, a team building intervention based on the latest empirical research was developed and tested to address the potential performance losses associated to diversity in decision-making teams. The team building intervention provides six crucial elements, namely (1) direct experience of how deep-level team diversity affect team dynamics, (2) diversity education, (3) cultivation of …

A Framework To Simplify The Choice Of Alternative Analysis And Selection Methods, James Paul Lewis Holzgrefe

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation contributes a framework for analysts and engineering managers to investigate and choose alternative analysis and selection methods based upon their problem and its context. It began as an investigation into the alternative analysis and selection methods used in military planning. The existing military methods were inconsistent, violated the decision science body of knowledge, and provided no guidance to the practitioner on matching methods to problems. These challenges made it necessary to conduct this investigation.

This research used a three-phase mixed methods approach. The first phase applied the general inductive method to the decision making body of knowledge to …

Semantic Shift To Pragmatic Meaning In Shared Decision Making: Situation Theory Perspective, M. Canan, A. Sousa-Poza, S. F. Kovacic

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

The way humans establish communication depends on the generation and conveyance of meaning. Linguistically, meaning in information is dependent on the meaning that is ascribed to signifiers in the context of the communication. These signifiers can include items such as words, phrases, signs, and symbols. Conveyance of meaning may, however, imprecise and prone to error. The meaning of information in communication may arise from a change in the context in which a signifier is placed (intrinsic), or a change in the paradigm with which the signifier and context are perceived (extrinsic). In simple situations, where paradigms are reconcilable, semantic shift …

Effects Of Signal Ambiguity And Signal Location On Target Detection Under Varying Degrees Of Time Constraint, Kimberly E. Culley

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of the current study was to investigate the effects of decision-making strategies and tendencies, time constraint, and signal characteristics on decision-making performance utilizing the fuzzy signal detection theory framework. Participants were tasked with deciding whether x-ray images of passenger luggage contained hazardous objects.

The first objective of the study was to develop a methodology for quantifying optimizing versus satisficing tendencies in decision making through direct measurement and observation.

The second objective of the study was to examine how time constraint and specific signal characteristics contribute to decision making. Interestingly, despite having more time available to conduct a comprehensive …

Project-Risk Management And Decision Analysis In Maritime Maintenance And Repair, Michael C. Plumb, C. Ariel Pinto, Rafael Landaeta, Resit Unal, Thomas Murphy

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

The purpose of this paper is to provide insights regarding the implementation of using Project Risk Management (PRM) and Decision Analysis (DA) in managing projects for complex systems such as maritime vessels. The PRM approach apprehends many forms of risk both internal and external within a given project and assists the manager in determining the level of importance of each individual project phase and component to optimize project success. Ship Maintenance and Repair project decision-making requires that risk management and risk analysis techniques be applied in order to guide management in making better decisions to meet ship service life perspective. …

Reverse Decision Making And Goal Attainment A Proof Of Concept As A New Approach To The Decision Making Process Under Uncertainty, Shitalkumar S. Sabne

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Decision making occurs when one must choose among alternatives. However, in uncertain environments where problems are complex and decision makers lack complete knowledge of the situation as well as decision alternatives, it's not possible for them to select an optimal decision outcome by 'Traditional Decision Approaches'. At present Reverse Decision Making is the central, although new and unproved, approach of Old Dominion University's Engineering Management and Systems Engineering research on decision making process for uncertain and complex situations. Even though research in decision making spans over one hundred years, there are still important problems which remain to be addressed.

There …

Including Organizational Cultural Parameters In Work Processes, Holly A. H. Handley, Nancy J. Heacox

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Recent work in modeling decision-making work processes has focused on including the national culture of individual decision-makers in order to emphasize the differences in decision criteria between decision-makers of different nationalities. In addition to nationality, a decision-maker is also a member of an organization and brings this organizational culture to his role in the work process, where it may also affect his task performance. In order to represent the organizational impact on the work process, five organizational cultural parameters were identified and included in an algorithm for modeling and simulation of cultural difference in human decision-making. While the five modifiers …

A Task Process Pre-Experimental Model, Holly A. H. Handley, Alexander H. Lewis

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

The Adaptive Architectures for Command and Control (A2C2) program is a multidisciplinary program that employs a scientific basis for designing and analyzing adaptive and reconfigurable organizational structures at the Joint Task Force level. As part of its unique model-driven experimentation method, a pre-experimental model is created to support the formulation of hypotheses, the determination of key variables and parameter values, and the prediction of organizational performance. The pre-experimental model is used to explore the parameters of the experimental design in order to determine the appropriate region to conduct officer-in-the-loop experiments at the Naval Postgraduate School. A pre-experimental model based on …

Incorporating Heterogeneity In Command Center Interactions, Holly A. H. Handley, Alexander H. Levis

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

One of the many complexities of multinational coalition operations stems from differences in culture, military procedures, and command and control processes between the cooperating command centers. These differences can influence the interactions between decision makers of different command centers and can affect the outcome of the coalition operation. A coalition model, composed of individual models of the five-stage interacting decision maker model, was used in a virtual experiment. The subjective parameters included in the decision maker model can be any attribute that characterizes the heterogeneity of the decision makers. In this case, the parameters of power distance and uncertainty avoidance …

A Study Of Similarity And Analogical Decision-Making In Collaborative Design, Christopher Edward Weeks

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of similarity and analogy in design communication and propose a descriptive representation of the analogical decision-making process in the context of engineering design. It is proposed that social, cultural, and contextual knowledge are brought to bear on statements of need in the form of analogy as a means to elicit and evince potential design solutions. A goal of this study is to identify communicative behaviors, representing process variables of analogical decision-making, that can be used to describe how design information is represented, manipulated, and conveyed in a collaborative design effort. …