Meetings and Events 2011
Past Meetings and Events, 2011
The Mathematical Theory of Negotiations and Coalition-Building by Douglas A. Samuelson
Date: Tuesday October 18, 2011 6:00 - 8:30 PM We present the mathematical economics of group formation and negotiation, building on earlier work on the allocation of senior decision-makers’ attention. Constituent groups seek to maximize their net benefits from negotiation, taking into account costs, including the cost of compensating negotiators and other parties who may extract some benefit from the transactions. Groups form and cohere only when their members benefits from doing so; in some cases, only a leader derives sufficient benefit to make it worthwhile to drive formation of the group. Negotiators do not always act in the interest of the constituent parties. Hence it is impossible to run an organization or a complex negotiation without payoffs most people would view as corrupt. The efficient solution is to structure such payoffs to be predictable and to resist frequent renegotiation. Douglas A. Samuelson is President and Chief Scientist of InfoLogix, Inc., a research and development company in Annandale, Virginia. He has also been a Federal policy analyst, inventor, high-tech entrepreneur and executive, and university faculty member. He is perhaps best known for his popular and long-running “The ORacle” column in OR/MS Today. He has a D.Sc. in operations research from George Washington University. |
Eliciting Bounded Alternatives by Russ Vane, PhD
Date: Tuesday, September 20, 2011 6:00 - 8:30 PM In this highly interactive session, Dr. Vane shows how to discover and record organizational models about the present, past and future using subject matter experts. His example will be an IT project. He describes how to start, perform and stop the process. This presentation has proven to be is particularly helpful for independent consultants, project managers, and policy makers (or their staff). Doctoral students are most welcomed. In the last 44 months, Russ has led and facilitated nearly 200 wargames related to current US conflicts and improvised explosives. Concepts discussed will include Operational Closure and Hypergame Theory. Dr. Russ Vane, is a past president of WINFORMS and an INFORMS “Moving Spirit Award” recipient. Russ accomplished a great deal in his leadership roles with INFORMS and WINFORMS over the years. Russ became active in WINFORMS in the spring 2000 and has been a member of INFORMS for many years. Currently, Russ is a Managing Consultant at IBM Global Business Services. Previously, Russ held the following positions:
Russ received his PhD from George Mason University after earning degrees at the University of Pennsylvania and The Johns Hopkins University. Russ professional specialties include adversarial reasoning, hypergame theory, software agent architectures, and modeling and simulation. |
Soft Skills Workshop: Real-World Skills for Analysts by F. Freeman Marvin and Paul Wicker
Date: Tuesday, May 17 at 6:00 - 8:00 PM A team of operations research practitioners developed the Soft Skills Workshop in 2008 as a professional forum to improve the interpersonal skills of analysts. The one-day workshop is a unique learning opportunity that combines best practice tutorials with an interactive case study. The team facilitated the workshop for the past three years prior to the annual INFORMS Conference on OR Practice. It has received positive reviews from participants as a valuable developmental experience. The instructor team organizes the day around six categories of people who analysts interact with during the course of a typical project: clients, other project team members, stakeholders, subject matter experts, working groups, and decision makers. Participants learn elicitation techniques for interviewing individuals and for gathering judgments from groups. They learn the principles of good group process and proven techniques for planning effective meetings and managing interpersonal conflict within a team. They learn how to conduct a stakeholder analysis, use it to help frame the problem, identify key decision points, and develop viable alternatives for analysis. They also learn effective data display and presentation techniques for communicating results. At the end of the day, the participants must brief a ‘decision-maker’ on the results of their case study analysis.
The Soft Skills Workshop Team is: |
How to Validate Your Models and Simulations by Averill M. Law, Ph.D.
Date: Thursday, April 14, 2011 In this tutorial we present techniques for building valid and credible simulation models. Ideas to be discussed include the importance of a definitive problem formulation, discussions with subject-matter experts, interacting with the decision-maker on a regular basis, development of a written assumptions document, structured walk-through of the assumptions document, use of sensitivity analysis to determine important model factors, and comparison of model and system output data for an existing system (if any). Each idea will be illustrated by one or more real-world examples. We will also discuss the difficulty in using formal statistical techniques (i.e., hypothesis tests and confidence intervals) to validate simulation models. Dr. Averill M. Law, the President of Averill M. Law & Associates, is one of the world’s foremost experts on simulation modeling. He has been a simulation consultant to numerous organizations including Accenture, ARCO, Boeing, Booz Allen & Hamilton, Defense Modeling and Simulation Office, Hewlett-Packard, Kimberly-Clark, M&M/Mars, Monsanto, Oak Ridge National Lab, SAIC, 3M, Tropicana, Xerox, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Army, U.S. Marines, U.S. Navy, and U.S. Post Office. Dr. Law has presented more than 500 simulation short courses in 18 countries. He has written or coauthored numerous papers and books on simulation, operations research, statistics, manufacturing, and communications, including the definitive book Simulation Modeling and Analysis that has more than 135,000 copies in print and considered the ‘bible’ of simulation. He developed ExpertFit, which has been the leading distribution-fitting software since 1983. He also produced several videotapes on simulation modeling. Dr.Law has been the keynote speaker at simulation conferences worldwide. He won the 2009 INFORMS Simulation Society Lifetime Professional Achievement Award. Dr. Law has been a tenured faculty member at the Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison and the Univ. of Arizona. He has a Ph.D. in industrial engineering and operations research from the Univ. of California at Berkeley. |
Self-Organizing Cooperative Dynamics in Government Extended Enterprises: Understanding Behavioral Forces by Lawrence John, Patricia M. McCormick, Tom McCormick, Greg McNeill and John Boardman
Date: Tuesday, March 22, 2011 Government organizations bring resources to bear to provide services to citizens that the citizens cannot provide themselves. In the U.S. system, while some services are wholly contained in one Department or agency, others span multiple departments and agencies. The U.S. Counterterrorism (CT) Enterprise falls into the latter category, comprising partners in law enforcement, intelligence, the military, and diplomatic circles including, but not limited to, the Departments of Defense (DoD), Homeland Security (DHS), Justice (DoJ), and State (DOS), and the Intelligence Community (IC)--as well as state and local law enforcement agencies. Along with much good work, institutional wrangling, tensions, communication failures, friction, and poor coordination have ensued. Success in areas like CT requires each partner to transcend their individual missions and work together as a high-functioning system of systems. Yet it is clear that they often do not, at least in part because the federal government’s budget decisions inevitably involve [competitively] trading the demands of some groups against those of others. Even resources for missions as critical as providing national security, whose nature as a ‘public good’ has been understood for decades and is concontroversial, are the subject of intense bureaucratic competition. Replacing that competition with increased cooperation may be critical to ‘success with affordability.’ Building upon the concept of an ‘extended enterprise’ as the entire set of collaborating organizations that work together to deliver value, we view government-run joint and interagency efforts as ‘government extended enterprises’ (GEEs)--complex dynamical systems of systems (SoS) comprising effectively autonomous government and related organizations that must cooperate voluntarily to achieve desired outcomes. Using a physics-based metaphor, this paper investigates the possibility that decision makers may be able improve cooperation and operational effectiveness at the GEE level by leveraging a set of four ‘canonical behavioral forces’ (Sympathy, Trust, Greed and Fear) to manipulate the set of SoS ‘differentiating characteristics’ (Autonomy, Belonging, Connectivity, Diversity and Emergence) defined by Boardman and Sauser. We describe the concepts involved, postulate key relationships among them, and detail a game theoretic methodology executing a real-world case in an agent-based model as a proof-of-concept. Our case is the U.S. CT Enterprise’s response to ‘the Christmas Day Bomber,’ as discussed in the unclassified Executive Summary by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI). This effort is part of a continuing research program into theory-based approaches to stimulating and managing cooperation among systems of autonomous organization (what systems thinker Peter Checkland calls ‘human activity systems’). Its intellectual lineage stretches from Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which explains why humans can be both ‘self regarding’ and ‘other regarding’ through many contemporary efforts. These include H. W. Lambright’s penetrating case study of interagency cooperation in the US Global Change Research Program, Robert Axelrod’s groundbreaking evolutionary game theoretic studies of cooperation strategies, and the more than 150 studies on the nature of cooperation and the rules that comprise institutions in public goods problems by Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom and her students. It also leverages the results of extensive interdisciplinary research into the evolutionary basis for human cooperation by Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis and their colleagues; and work on the impact of trust on cooperation decisions by Russell Hardin, Elinor Ostrom and others. As a work in the discipline of systems engineering, it expands the understanding and application of John Boardman, Brian Sauser, and Alex Gordo’s recent definitional work on what it means to be a SoS; subsequent work on modeling the SoS characteristics by Clif Baldwin and Brian Sauser; and Michael DiMario, John Boardman and Brian Sauser’s study of how collaborative systems form to provide increased utility. The intended products of this effort are a new way to understand the dynamics of organizational cooperation based on emerging concepts in systems thinking, and a tool and process for applying that understanding to the kinds of complex inter-organizational challenges government decision makers and administrators face every day. Lawrence John is a Principal Analyst with Analytic Services, Inc. (ANSER), a not-for-profit public service research institute in Arlington, VA and, through ANSER's Applied Systems Thinking Institute, a PhD candidate in the Systems Engineering program in the School of Systems and Enterprises at Stevens Institute of Technology. A retired US Air Force officer, he has over 20 years of experience as a practicing strategic business consultant, enterprise architect and operations analyst for decision makers at all levels within the US government, the US Intelligence Community, and a variety of US and international military organizations. His current research program centers on the principles of resilience in the extended enterprise, with special emphasis on the dynamics of cooperation and the role of paradox. Mr. John holds a BA in Political Science from Penn State and a Masters in Public Administration from Northern Michigan University. He is a member of AFCEA, IEEE, INCOSE, M! ORS, the American Societies for Public Administration (ASPA) and Quality (ASQ). |
Complexity, Terror, and Murphy's Law by Tom and Patricia McCormick
Date: Tuesday, January 25, 2011 In July of 2010, the DoD Biometric Information Management Agency sponsored a scenario-driven, simulation-based operational utility workshop to examine the impact of alternative biometric information collection, processing, storage, and sharing architectures among four Federal Departments: the DoD; DHS, Department of State, and Department of Justice. The approach used by the team to conduct the workshop was based on a federated set of five different simulation tools working against a common scenario package. The focus of the Federal biometrically enabled identity operation simulated was the ability of the architectures to forestall up to four preplanned terrorist attacks, based on various DHS National Planning scenarios. As indicated in the title, Murphy was present in the details of the process and the team learned some useful lessons in dealing with that factor. This presentation discusses the modeling and simulation approach developed and used by the study team to execute the workshop. In addition, it presents a summary level presentation of the outcome of the workshop. Patricia M. McCormick , Alpha Informatics, Limited, is a 1982 graduate of USMA. She holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science and a master’s degree (with distinction) in operations research. She led the simulation team, and was directly responsible for the information flow simulation. She has more than 25 years experience in the application of modeling and simulation to solve complex operational problems, 14 of those years as the president/ CEO of Alpha Informatics. Tom McCormick, Alpha Informatics, Limited, holds a bachelor’s degree in history, a master's degree in international relations/strategic studies, and a master's degree in systems management. He was responsible for development and instantiation of the operational scenario used by the study team, as well as the planning for and post processing analysis of data. He has more than 40 years experience in the application of modeling and simulation to complex issues. He is a senior analyst for Alpha Informatics, Limited. |
