Decision Making For Complex Socio Technical Systems

The long-term governance of radioactive waste continues to be a major complex and unresolved socio-technical issue. Previous technocratic approaches have so far failed. This empirically based study provides a novel approach to complementing technical expertise and economic/political power with stakeholder involvement. Inclusive participation is shown to be an asset that strengthens the processes, enhances robustness and facilitates sustainable decision making, thus adding value for all involved.

Transdisciplinary engineering transcends other inter- and multi-disciplinary ways of working, such as Concurrent Engineering (CE). In particular, transdisciplinary processes are aimed at solving complex, ill-defined problems, or problems for which the solution is not immediately obvious. No one discipline or single person can provide sufficient knowledge to solve such problems, so collaboration is essential. This book presents the proceedings of the 27th ISTE International Conference on Transdisciplinary Engineering, organized by Warsaw University of Technology, Poland, from 1-10 July 2020. ISTE2020 was the first of this conference series to be held virtually, due to the COVID-19 restrictions. Entitled Transdisciplinary Engineering for Complex Socio-technical Systems - Real-life Applications, the book includes 71 peer-reviewed papers presented at the conference by authors from 17 countries. These range from theoretical and conceptual to strongly pragmatic and addressing industrial best practice and, together with invited talks, they have been collated into 9 sections: Transdisciplinary Engineering (7 papers); Transdisciplinary Engineering Education (4 papers); Industry 4.0, Methods and Tools (7 papers); Human-centered Design (8 papers); Methods and Tools for Design and Production (14 papers); Product and Process Development (9 papers); Knowledge and Data Modeling (13 papers); Business Process and Supply Chain Management (7 papers); and Sustainability (2 papers). The book provides an overview of new approaches, methods, tools and their applications, as well as current research and development, and will be of interest to researchers, design practitioners, and educators working in the field.

Industry and society are complex socio-technical systems, and both face problems that can only be solved by collaboration between different disciplines. Collaboration between academia and practice is also needed to develop viable solutions. Many engineering problems also require such an approach, which is known as Transdisciplinary Engineering (TE). This book presents the proceedings of the 26th ISTE International Conference on Transdisciplinary Engineering, held in Tokyo, Japan, from 30 July - 1 August 2019. The title of the conference was: Transdisciplinary Engineering for Complex Socio-technical Systems, and of the 86 submitted papers, 68 peer-reviewed papers by authors from 17 countries were delivered at the conference. These papers range from theoretical and conceptual to strongly pragmatic. They address industrial best practice and are grouped here under 10 themes: advanced robotics for smart manufacturing; design of personalized products and services; engineering methods for industry 4.0; additive and subtractive manufacturing; decision supporting tools and methods; complex systems engineering; big data analytics in manufacturing and services; concurrent engineering; cost modeling; and digital manufacturing, modeling and simulation. Presenting the latest research results and knowledge of product creation processes and related methodologies, the book will be of interest to researchers, design practitioners, and educators alike.

Many complex systems in civil and military operations are highly automated with the intention of supporting human performance in difficult cognitive tasks. The complex systems can involve teams or individuals working on real-time supervisory control, command or information management tasks where a number of constraints must be satisfied. Decision Making in Complex Environments addresses the role of the human, the technology and the processes in complex socio-technical and technological systems. The aim of the book is to apply a multi-disciplinary perspective to the examination of the human factors in complex decision making. It contains more than 30 contributions on key subjects such as military human factors, team decision making issues, situation awareness, and technology support. In addition to the major application area of military human factors there are chapters on business, medical, governmental and aeronautical decision making. The book provides a unique blend of expertise from psychology, human factors, industry, commercial environments, the military, computer science, organizational psychology and training that should be valuable to academics and practitioners alike.

The integration of technology into the aviation system planning has allowed for more stable, yet increasingly complex, models that enable better analysis techniques and new approaches to decision-making. These modern advances ensure higher productivity in addressing various planning problems. Socio-Technical Decision Support in Air Navigation Systems: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a critical scholarly resource that contains a systematic analysis of formalized factors affecting socio-technical systems operators and how these factors influence decision-making process of professional and non-professional activities in air navigation systems. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics, such as dimensional modeling, applications of decision support systems, and semantic analysis, this book is geared towards academicians, future pilots, aviation dispatchers, engineers, managers, and students.

The goal to improve the resilience of social systems – communities and their economies – is increasingly adopted by decision makers. This unique and comprehensive Handbook focuses on the interdependencies of these social systems and the technologies that support them. Special attention is given to the ways in which resilience is conceptualized by different disciplines, how resilience may be assessed, and how resilience strategies are implemented. Case illustrations are presented throughout to aid understanding.

Decision makers in large scale interconnected network systems require simulation models for decision support. The behaviour of these systems is determined by many actors, situated in a dynamic, multi-actor, multi-objective and multi-level environment. How can such systems be modelled and how can the socio-technical complexity be captured? Agent-based modelling is a proven approach to handle this challenge. This book provides a practical introduction to agent-based modelling of socio-technical systems, based on a methodology that has been developed at TU Delft and which has been deployed in a large number of case studies. The book consists of two parts: the first presents the background, theory and methodology as well as practical guidelines and procedures for building models. In the second part this theory is applied to a number of case studies, where for each model the development steps are presented extensively, preparing the reader for creating own models.

Presents the advances in decision support theory and practice with a focus on bridging the socio-technical gap. This book covers a wide range of topics including: Understanding DM, Design of DSS, Web 2.0 Systems in Decision Support, Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing, Applications of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis, and more.