Analysis and Forecasting of Mass Shootings Using Change Point Detection

Motivations We do not know: how the occurring rate of active and mass shootings changed over past few years when the change of occurring rate occurred the overall trend of the number of active and mass shootings over next few year

Decision Making and Quality: The Flint Water Crisis

Flint is a poor city with 41% of residents below federal poverty line. In 2011 Flint declared a financial state of emergency. An Emergency Financial Manager (EFM) had control over most city governing matters. In 2014 Flint switched from pre-treated Detroit water (DSWD) to the Flint River in an effort to save money. Failure to ensure water quality led to the Flint Water Crisis

Decision Making for Different Types of Variation in a Manufacturing System

Research goals: Analyze performance of different decision-making strategies when there is common cause variation; Simulate how human operators may interpret common cause variation; Common cause variation is natural variation in the process

Online Testing to Assess Performance of Students in a Large Engineering Class

Fall 2017: Engineering Economic Analysis course •242 students: in-class and distance learning •New assessment procedure: Online testing modules •7 required online testing modules •2 bonus testing modules to earn an A •Semester grades determined completely by number of modules passed •Unlimited number of attempts for each testing module •Randomly chosen question

Allocating Resources to Enhance Resilience, with Application to Superstorm Sandy and an Electric Utility

This article constructs a framework to help a decisionmaker allocate resources to increase his or her organization\u27s resilience to a system disruption, where resilience is measured as a function of the average loss per unit time and the time needed to recover full functionality. Enhancing resilience prior to a disruption involves allocating resources from a fixed budget to reduce the value of one or both of these characteristics. We first look at characterizing the optimal resource allocations associated with several standard allocation functions. Because the resources are being allocated before the disruption, however, the initial loss and recovery time may not be known with certainty. We thus also apply the optimal resource allocation model for resilience to three models of uncertain disruptions: (1) independent probabilities, (2) dependent probabilities, and (3) unknown probabilities. The optimization model is applied to an example of increasing the resilience of an electric power network following Superstorm Sandy

Finalist—2017 M&SOM Practice-Based Research Competition—The Hurricane Decision Simulator: A Tool for Marine Forces in New Orleans to Practice Operations Management in Advance of a Hurricane

The U.S. Marine Forces Reserve (MFR) in New Orleans is frequently threatened by hurricanes. To protect the safety of personnel and their families while maintaining mission capability, the Commander must make timely decisions to set up an alternate headquarters and allow for an orderly evacuation. The MFR relies on forecasts from the National Hurricane Center, but these forecasts are uncertain, are updated frequently, and can be difficult to interpret in the context of the MFR\u27s decision timeline. In addition, there are few opportunities to learn from experience.We developed the Hurricane Decision Simulator (HDS) to allow MFR personnel to practice making preparation decisions in the context of many realistic simulated storms and forecasts, and to develop a better understanding of the decision sequence, the forecast products and their relationship. The HDS has improved MFR\u27s training and readiness for hurricane preparation operations and decision making by enabling more and better focused training and is being extended to other facilities

Supply Chain Risk Analysis Using Dynamic Fault Tree

Outline: 1. Motivations 2. Main-backup supply chain 3. Mutual-assistance supply chain 4. Conclusion

Do students learn better using online testing with multiple attempts?

A new method to assess student learning was implemented for IE 305 Engineering Economic Analysis. Students were evaluated with online testing modules which they could take repeatedly until they passed. Questions were randomized; very unlikely that a student ever received the exact same question. Goal: Evaluate students’ performance when they are allowed multiple attempts of online tests and compare student performance to traditional assessment methods

A Multiple Decision-Maker Approach to Resource Allocation Models for Prevention, Preparation, and Response to Major Disruptions

Dealing with disruptions require attention to prevention, preparation, and response. Cost individuals and organizations large amounts of both time and money. Susceptibility to, and damage from, disruptions can vary based on geographical location

The Hurwicz decision rule’s relationship to decision making with the triangle and beta distributions and exponential utility

Non-probabilistic approaches to decision making have been proposed for situations in which an individual does not have enough information to assess probabilities over an uncertainty. One non-probabilistic method is to use intervals in which an uncertainty has a minimum and maximum but nothing is assumed about the relative likelihood of any value within the interval. The Hurwicz decision rule in which a parameter trades off between pessimism and optimism generalizes the current rules for making decisions with intervals. This article analyzes the relationship between intervals based on the Hurwicz rule and traditional decision analysis using a few probability distributions and an exponential utility functions. This article shows that the Hurwicz decision rule for an interval is logically equivalent to: (i) an expected value decision with a triangle distribution over the interval; (ii) an expected value decision with a beta distribution; and (iii) an expected utility decision with constant absolute risk aversion with a uniform distribution. These probability distributions are not exhaustive. There are likely other distributions and utility functions for which equivalence with the Hurwicz decision rule can also be established. Since a frequent reason for the use intervals is that intervals assume less information than a probability distribution, the results in this article call into question whether decision making based on intervals really assumes less information than subjective expected utility decision making