Operations Management and Decision Making in Deployment of an On-Site Biological Analytical Capacity

Deployment of an on-site laboratory to contain an expanding outbreak and protect public health through rapid diagnosis of infected patients and identification of their contacts is a challenging and complex response, further complicated by time limitation and dramatic consequences of failure. Effective operations management and decision-making are critical for a successful Fieldable Laboratory (FL) mission at each phase of the mission. To analyze the principles and challenges of the operations management and associated decision-making process, the FL mission has been broken down into five successive interlinked phases defined as the “FL mission cycle” (FL-MC). Each phase comprises a set of operational functions (OFs) corresponding to the mission activities. Some decisions are associated with a single OF, whereas others are taken across different OFs and FL-MC phases. All decisions are treated as logical entities inherently linked to each other and to the whole situational context within the FL operational domain. Being part of the laboratory information management system (LIMS), the FL domain ontology is developed as the main knowledge management tool supporting the decision-making process. This is an essential way to promote interoperability and scalability between different FL modules and health care capacities during cross-border biological crises

Decision support in a fieldable laboratory management during an epidemic outbreak of disease

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze the decision-making process and provide a decision support framework for deployment of an on-site analytical capacity (a fieldable laboratory (FL)) to contain an expanding outbreak and protect public health. Design/methodology/approach – The FL mission cycle consists of five successive interlinked phases with a set of operational functions (OFs) performed during the mission. The list of phases, OFs and their contents were iteratively developed during and after FL missions and validated with operational partners. Findings – The well-defined structure of the FL domain appears as the best functional basis for tracking the decision-making process across the whole mission cycle. Description of all the FL elements and information flows addresses the major issue of interoperability of resources used by similar international capacities (inter-)acting as operational partners in global response to the crisis. Originality/value – The work presents the first attempt in this field to systematically describe and chronologically organize the decisions taken by a FL manager and staff during all phases of the FL mission cycle. Definition of OFs with all the related information flows allows for comparison of procedures, their better planning and refining, validation of protocols, mutual training and operational improvement between FLs from different geographical, organizational and cultural origins

Chapter Operations Management and Decision Making in Deployment of an On-Site Biological Analytical Capacity

Deployment of an on-site laboratory to contain an expanding outbreak and protect public health through rapid diagnosis of infected patients and identification of their contacts is a challenging and complex response, further complicated by time limitation and dramatic consequences of failure. Effective operations management and decision-making are critical for a successful Fieldable Laboratory (FL) mission at each phase of the mission. To analyze the principles and challenges of the operations management and associated decision-making process, the FL mission has been broken down into five successive interlinked phases defined as the “FL mission cycle” (FL-MC). Each phase comprises a set of operational functions (OFs) corresponding to the mission activities. Some decisions are associated with a single OF, whereas others are taken across different OFs and FL-MC phases. All decisions are treated as logical entities inherently linked to each other and to the whole situational context within the FL operational domain. Being part of the laboratory information management system (LIMS), the FL domain ontology is developed as the main knowledge management tool supporting the decision-making process. This is an essential way to promote interoperability and scalability between different FL modules and health care capacities during cross-border biological crises

Plan Recognition Using Multimodal Integration

We describe an ongoing research aimed at development of an anthropomorphic multimodal interface (meaning an interface for which the goal is not to precisely achieve a measurable task, like in instrumental interfaces, but more to provide a natural interaction) for recognition of a general intention, as well as of particular goals and plan fragments. To recognize the communicative and overall practical intentions and goals of a person we use information arriving from natural language and gestures (actions). The result of the multimodal integration is a joint semantic meaning representation of the multimodal behavior and communicative intentions of the user. We use semantic frames (with slots to be filled, situational modeling) defining for every type of intention (goal) what can be said, with which gestures, actions emotions (using a multimoda

Multimodal Multi-Level Fusion Using Contextual Information

A new method of multimodal multi-level fusion integrating contextual information obtained from spoken input and visual scene analysis is being developed at Université Catholique de Louvain in the frame of the EU-funded SIMILAR Network of Excellence. An experimented application example is the “intelligent diary” aimed at proactively assisting elderly people living alone at home to perform their daily activities, to prolong their safe and secure personal autonomy, to support their active ageing and social cohesion