Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

Computational Decision Support For Socio-Technical Awareness Of Land-Use Planning Under Complexity—A Dam Resilience Planning Case Study, Andreas Tolk, Jennifer A. Richkus, F. Leron Shults, Wesley J. Wildman

VMASC Publications

Land-use planning for modern societies requires technical competence as well as social competence. We therefore propose an integrative solution enabling better land-use planning and management through better-informed decision-making. We adapt a method developed for cross-disciplinary team building to identify the stakeholders and their various objectives and value systems. We use these results to populate artificial societies embedded into a dynamic data analytics framework as a tool to identify, explore, and visualize the challenges resulting from the different objectives and value systems in land-use planning and management. To prove the feasibility of the proposed solution, we present two use cases from …

Simulation-Based Optimization: Implications Of Complex Adaptive Systems And Deep Uncertainty, Andreas Tolk

VMASC Publications

Within the modeling and simulation community, simulation-based optimization has often been successfully used to improve productivity and business processes. However, the increased importance of using simulation to better understand complex adaptive systems and address operations research questions characterized by deep uncertainty, such as the need for policy support within socio-technical systems, leads to the necessity to revisit the way simulation can be applied in this new area. Similar observations can be made for complex adaptive systems that constantly change their behavior, which is reflected in a continually changing solution space. Deep uncertainty describes problems with inadequate or incomplete information about …

Combining Green Metrics And Digital Twins For Sustainability Planning And Governance Of Smart Buildings And Cities, Casey R. Corrado, Suzanne M. Delong, Emily G. Holt, Edward Y. Hua, Andreas Tolk

VMASC Publications

Creating a more sustainable world will require a coordinated effort to address the rise of social, economic, and environmental concerns resulting from the continuous growth of cities. Supporting planners with tools to address them is pivotal, and sustainability is one of the main objectives. Modeling and simulation augmenting digital twins can play an important role to implement these tools. Although various green best practices have been utilized over time and there are related attempts at measuring green success, works in the published literature tend to focus on addressing a single problem (e.g., energy efficiency), and a comprehensive approach that takes …

A Literature Review On Combining Heuristics And Exact Algorithms In Combinatorial Optimization, Hesamoddin Tahami, Hengameh Fakhravar

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

There are several approaches for solving hard optimization problems. Mathematical programming techniques such as (integer) linear programming-based methods and metaheuristic approaches are two extremely effective streams for combinatorial problems. Different research streams, more or less in isolation from one another, created these two. Only several years ago, many scholars noticed the advantages and enormous potential of building hybrids of combining mathematical programming methodologies and metaheuristics. In reality, many problems can be solved much better by exploiting synergies between these approaches than by “pure” classical algorithms. The key question is how to integrate mathematical programming methods and metaheuristics to achieve such …

Computational Decision Support For The Covid-19 Healthcare Coalition, Andreas Tolk, Christopher Glazner, Joseph Ungerleider

VMASC Publications

In the early months of 2020, the SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus took the world by surprise, resulting in the COVID-19 pandemic that has caused significant loss of lives and challenged the sustainability of our health care systems. In mid-March, it became obvious that government and communities had to react immediately. Under the lead of the Mayo Clinic and The MITRE Corporation, the COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition (C19HCC) was established as a coordinated public-interest, private-sector response. The coalition brought healthcare organizations, technology firms, nonprofits, academia, and startups to support supply chains, inform coordinated social policies, and provide data-driven insights to protect people and preserve …

Foundations For A Game Theoretic Framework For Agile Acquisition, Scott Rosen, Kelly Horinek, Alexander Odeh, Les Servi, Andreas Tolk

VMASC Publications

This article investigates the concept of developing a game theoretic framework that is based on the application of buyer and seller utility functions to support the bidding process in government acquisition. The results of a literature survey of utility function approaches, with potential to provide a suitable foundation to a game theory framework for acquisition, are presented. The utility function methods found most promising were further adapted and tested: the Best-Worst method, the Multi-Swing Method, and Functional Dependency for Network Analysis. To test the scalability of the approach, the Best-Worst method is applied to a larger problem to show the …

An Agent Based Approach For Simulating Demo Enterprise Models, Mamadou Seck, Joseph Barjis

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

DEMO (design and engineering methodology for organization) is a theoretically grounded methodology for rigorous enterprise modeling. It provides relevant concepts from a construction perspective. As the methodology gains a wider audience, there is a growing interest in simulating DEMO models. Most attempts to develop a simulation approach for enterprise models in general, and the DEMO methodology in particular, are based on process oriented conceptualizations that are typically implementation in a discrete event paradigm. In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework for the translation of DEMO models into an agent based simulation. We will describe the DEMO methodology in some …

Employee-Task Assignments For Organization Modeling: A Review Of Models And Applications, Cansu Kandemir, Holly A. H. Handley, S. Long (Ed.), E.-H. Ng (Ed.), C. Downing (Ed.)

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

In this study, we present a review of task assignment problems in organizations, an area that has become more important as tasks become more complex and personnel skills become more specialized. The challenge is to design task assignments that meet all requirements and result in the best organizational performance. The consequences of poor design include failed tasks, reduced efficiency, and inability to meet deadlines. Moreover, inequity of workload between employees can cause lack of job satisfaction, loss of motivation and also boredom.

In general, work processes in organizations consist of different tasks, which require different expertise. Personnel usually have various …

Reference Modelling In Support Of M&S—Foundations And Applications, Andreas Tolk, Saikou Diallo, Jose Padilla, H. Herencia-Zapana

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Whether by design or by practice, systems engineering (SE) processes are used more and more often in Modeling and Simulation (M&S). While the two disciplines are very close, there are some differences that must be taken into account in order to successfully reuse practices from one community to another. In this paper, we introduce the M&S System Development Framework (MS-SDF) that unifies SE and M&S processes. The MS-SDF comprises the SE processes of requirements capture, conceptual modelling, and verification and validation (V&V), and extends them to M&S. We use model theory as a deductive apparatus in order to develop the …