Development of virtual reality support to factory layout planning

Virtual reality (VR) technology has become ever mature today with affordable and yet powerful hardware. In the manufacturing industry, there is a growing interest of adopting VR to improve existing work procedures. Factory layout planning (FLP) is a long standing area in production engineering that sees great potentials of VR integration. Virtual reality supported layout planning (VLP) is gaining wider attention in research and practice as the virtual environment allows designers to test out “what if” scenarios in relative ease. However, previous research of VLP mostly focus on general layout planning but not the detailed level planning. Also, it is reported that the virtual modeling process is time-consuming and costly. In this study, we propose a point cloud based virtual factory modelling approach for the VLP tasks. It incorporates point cloud representation of physical environment with CAD data to model the virtual factory with the aims of simplifying the modelling process and improving decision-making for the VLP tasks. The proposed approach is exemplified and refined through three industrial cases. The implementations and results of the cases are highlighted and discussed in details. At the end, a general guidance for VLP is extracted and presented for future point cloud based VR support in FLP tasks

Deliberation, Representation, Equity

"What can we learn about the development of public interaction in e-democracy from a drama delivered by mobile headphones to an audience standing around a shopping center in a Stockholm suburb? In democratic societies there is widespread acknowledgment of the need to incorporate citizens’ input in decision-making processes in more or less structured ways. But participatory decision making is balancing on the borders of inclusion, structure, precision and accuracy. To simply enable more participation will not yield enhanced democracy, and there is a clear need for more elaborated elicitation and decision analytical tools. This rigorous and thought-provoking volume draws on a stimulating variety of international case studies, from flood risk management in the Red River Delta of Vietnam, to the consideration of alternatives to gold mining in Roșia Montană in Transylvania, to the application of multi-criteria decision analysis in evaluating the impact of e-learning opportunities at Uganda's Makerere University. Editors Love Ekenberg (senior research scholar, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis [IIASA], Laxenburg, professor of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University), Karin Hansson (artist and research fellow, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University), Mats Danielson (vice president and professor of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University, affiliate researcher, IIASA) and Göran Cars (professor of Societal Planning and Environment, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm) draw innovative collaborations between mathematics, social science, and the arts. They develop new problem formulations and solutions, with the aim of carrying decisions from agenda setting and problem awareness through to feasible courses of action by setting objectives, alternative generation, consequence assessments, and trade-off clarifications. As a result, this book is important new reading for decision makers in government, public administration and urban planning, as well as students and researchers in the fields of participatory democracy, urban planning, social policy, communication design, participatory art, decision theory, risk analysis and computer and systems sciences.

Deliberation, Representation, Equity

"What can we learn about the development of public interaction in e-democracy from a drama delivered by mobile headphones to an audience standing around a shopping center in a Stockholm suburb? In democratic societies there is widespread acknowledgment of the need to incorporate citizens’ input in decision-making processes in more or less structured ways. But participatory decision making is balancing on the borders of inclusion, structure, precision and accuracy. To simply enable more participation will not yield enhanced democracy, and there is a clear need for more elaborated elicitation and decision analytical tools. This rigorous and thought-provoking volume draws on a stimulating variety of international case studies, from flood risk management in the Red River Delta of Vietnam, to the consideration of alternatives to gold mining in Roșia Montană in Transylvania, to the application of multi-criteria decision analysis in evaluating the impact of e-learning opportunities at Uganda's Makerere University. Editors Love Ekenberg (senior research scholar, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis [IIASA], Laxenburg, professor of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University), Karin Hansson (artist and research fellow, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University), Mats Danielson (vice president and professor of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University, affiliate researcher, IIASA) and Göran Cars (professor of Societal Planning and Environment, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm) draw innovative collaborations between mathematics, social science, and the arts. They develop new problem formulations and solutions, with the aim of carrying decisions from agenda setting and problem awareness through to feasible courses of action by setting objectives, alternative generation, consequence assessments, and trade-off clarifications. As a result, this book is important new reading for decision makers in government, public administration and urban planning, as well as students and researchers in the fields of participatory democracy, urban planning, social policy, communication design, participatory art, decision theory, risk analysis and computer and systems sciences.

Decision Analysis in Situations with Conflicting Interests

Decision problems in participatory decision making involve multiple stakeholders, who often have conflicting preferences concerning the actions under consideration. Decision problems such as these can be structured as multi-criteria problems, which enables the actions to be evaluated in terms of more than one single criterion. In these situations, the complexity of the problem increases when the objective is to select a portfolio of actions. Another aspect to take into consideration is that the choice of actions often has a long-term impact on the lives of the stakeholders. It is therefore not surprising that these problems often are sources of costly and time-consuming conflicts. This thesis presents artifacts in the form of methods and applications aiding the decision maker in participatory decision making problems in highlighting stakeholder conflict. The artifacts are DANCE, XPLOR, POLA, and SENS. DANCE is a framework of methods that are used to elicit preferences, and to measure and analyze conflicts between and within stakeholder groups regarding the performance of an action. The framework uses three novel artifacts: i) CAR-CE a method for preference elicitation, ii) two indices, one for measuring the conflict within one stakeholder group, one for measuring the conflict between two stakeholder groups, and iii) an approach to portfolio optimisation and robustness analysis. XPLOR is a web-application that is used to explore and visualise stakeholder conflicts. POLA is a web-application for evaluating commercial development policy in cooperation with key stakeholders. The last artifact, SENSE, is a method for sensitivity analysis of portfolios. The artifact development followed the design science methodology, where the aim of the artifact is to solve a practical problem and where, in this case, the artifacts were evaluated against a set of requirements. The preference elicitation method, CAR-CE, was implemented in a web-questionnaire and was used in a real-world survey in cooperation with Upplands Väsby municipality. The elicited preferences were used in illustrative scenarios to demonstrate both the DANCE framework and XPLOR. POLA was demonstrated in three examples based on results from workshops that were conducted together with the municipalities of Norrköping, Katrineholm and Filipstad. Altogether, these artifacts support decision makers in modeling and analyzing decision problems, with the purpose of avoiding future costly and time-consuming conflicts in land use planning.At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 3: Submitted. Paper 5: In press.</p

Disagreement Constrained Action Selection in Participatory Portfolio Decision Analysis

In some portfolio decision problems it is not possible or interesting to constrain portfolios with a monetary budget. Instead it might be of interest to investigate how disagreement among a group of decision makers or stakeholders can be used as a constraint, and how this affects the portfolio composition. In this paper we present complementary decision evaluation methods for group portfolio decision analysis in situations where the stakeholders have conflicting preferences. The approach supports the analysis of a portfolio of planned actions in urban planning when a large group of stakeholders have inconsistent opinions with respect to the performance of each action. The group of stakeholders is, for each criterion, partitioned into two disagreeing groups based upon their views on the actions' performance. The distance between these two groups is then measured. An action's aggregated disagreement taking into account all criteria is then used as the action's associated resource constraint, and portfolios can be generated by solving a sequence of Knapsack problems. The robustness of the portfolios can be further evaluated with an a priori sensitivity analysis. The suggested approach supports decision makers by elucidating how the portfolio composition changes when the actions' aggregated disagreement increases

VirSim - a Model to Support Pandemic Policy Making

A simulation model called VirSim was developed to aid policy making in Sweden. The model simulates the spread of pandemic influenza, using real population data on a national and regional level. Swedish authorities wanted a model that was both quick to run and to implement as a complement to the existing model MicroSim. The possibility to interactively investigate the effect of varying different assumptions was an important aspect. The VirSim model proved useful for comparing different interventions strategies, and for forecasting the societal burden in terms of hospitalization and workplace absenteeism. This paper points out the usefulness of System Dynamics models in public policy making, as a complement to more detailed and time-consuming models

Portfolio Decision Analysis for Evaluating Stakeholder Conflicts in Land Use Planning

Urban planning typically involves multiple actors and stakeholders with conflicting opinions and diverging preferences. The proposed development plans and actions greatly affect the quality of life of the local community at different spatial scales and time horizons. Consequently, it is important for decision-makers to understand and analyse the conflicting needs and priorities of the local community. This paper presents a decision analytic framework for evaluating stakeholder conflicts in urban planning. First, the stakeholders state their preferences regarding the actions in terms of a set of criteria and estimate the weight of each criterion. Then, a conflict index and overall value for each action is calculated. Next, a set of Pareto efficient portfolios of actions are generated by solving an optimization problem with different levels of conflict as a resource constraint. Finally, a sensitivity analysis of the actions is performed. The framework is demonstrated using real-world survey data collected in the municipality of Upplands Vasby, Sweden

A Multicriteria Approach to Modelling Pandemic Response under Strong Uncertainty: A Case Study in Jordan

In responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, evidence-based policymaking and risk mitigation have been confronted with limited decision-making mechanisms under conditions of increased uncertainty. Such methods are particularly called for in contexts where reliable data to a large extent are missing and where the chosen policy would impact a variety of sectors. In this paper, we present an application of an integrated decision-making framework under ambiguity on how to contain the COVID-19 virus spread from a national policy point of view. The framework was applied in Jordan and considered both local epidemiologic and socioeconomic estimates in a multistakeholder multicriteria context. In particular, the cocreation process for eliciting attitudes, perceptions, and preferences amongst relevant stakeholder groups has often been missing from policy response to the pandemic, even though the containment measures&rsquo; efficiency largely depends on their acceptance by the impacted groups. For this, there exist several methods attempting to elicit criteria weights, values, and probabilities ranging from direct rating and point allocation methods to more elaborated ones. To facilitate the elicitation, some of the approaches utilise elicitation methods whereby prospects are ranked using ordinal importance information, while others use cardinal information. Methods are sometimes assessed in case studies or more formally by utilising systematic simulations. Furthermore, the treatment of corresponding methods for the handling of the alternative&rsquo;s values has sometimes been neglected. We demonstrate in our paper an approach for cardinal ranking in policy decision making in combination with imprecise or incomplete information concerning probabilities, weights, and consequences or alternative values. The results of our cocreation process are aggregated in the evaluation of alternative mitigation measures for Jordan, showcasing how a multistakeholder multicriteria decision mechanism can be employed in current or future challenges of pandemic situations, to facilitate management and mitigation of similar crises in the future, in any region