Report State of the Art Workshop Societal Complexity
2009
Dorien
DeTombe & Gerhard-Wilhelm Weber
Organized by
the
Euro Working Groups of Methodology of Societal Complexity, OR for Developing Countries, Ethics
& Centre
for Business Analytics at the University
of Applied Sciences, Remagen, Germany, Europe July 5, 2009 connected to the 23rd European Conference
on Operational Research EUROXXIII,
Bonn, 2009
See for Abstracts State of the Art Workshop Societal Complexity Bonn 2009
See
for Program of State
of the Art Workshop Societal Complexity Bonn 2009
The
goal of the State of the Art Workshop on Societal Complexity 2009 is to give
the Chairs of the Euro Working Groups who are doing research in overlapping
fields of societal complexity such as in ethics, decision making and
developing countries the opportunity to meet and discuss with each other
interesting content matters in their field. In this platform top researchers
have the opportunity to discuss the problematic and difficult issues in their
research among each other.
In
the workshop of half a day, each researcher gives a short overview of his/her
research field. In this multi-disciplined research group of highly scholar and
experimented researchers, the researchers have the opportunity to discuss the
questions and issues in the field of societal complexity that interest them
most. Each researcher gives an overview of their field, overview of recent
research, a discussion about future research questions, and discuss the latest
developments in research including interesting literature with a special focus
on problems in research, urgent societal issues and uncertainties.
The
workshop was evaluated by the participants as very useful and efficient.
Prof.
dr. Cathal M. Brugha of the Centre
for Business Analytics of the Quinn
School of Business University
College Dublin in Irelands discussed issues on the relation of China and
Europe based on his frequent visits to China and cooperation with Chinese
researchers. The starting point for putting this case is that Chinese growth
has been over-focused on trade to the U.S. market; it now needs to develop new
international markets, especially Europe. In working with the Chinese
researchers Brugha uses his own developed methodology based on on Nomology. He
encounters major culture differences in making decision and keeping
appointments and keep the agreements. It is not easy to build an
inter-cultural trust.
Prof. dr. Gerhard Wilhelm Weber
of the Middle East Technical University Institute of Applied Mathematics, ODTU
Ankara 06531 Turkey
presented the beauty of OR hosted and supported Data Mining. This has
become a vivid discipline with a growing number of important applications in
science, technology and social sciences. In fact, he motivated and presented
two new contributions in Clustering Theory and in Classification Theory. In
both cases, mathematics and statistics will be very helpful, in particular, by
the means of optimization theory. This presentation served as an appetite to
vivid modern OR.
Prof. dr.
Dorien DeTombe, Chair International Research Society on Methodology of Societal Complexity in
Amsterdam,
The Netherlands, presented the need of handling complex
societal problems, such as Global Safety, in a multidisciplinary in stead of
mono-disciplinary way. Policy makers on Global Safety often lack an overview
of issue, miss the real causes and suggest interventions that are based on a
too shallow analysis of the problem using a mono-disciplinary approach and
focus mostly only on the effects. In order to give politicians the
opportunity to handle complex problems multidisciplinary, multidisciplinary
research institutes should be created. These multidisciplinary research
institutes provide politicians with better approaches to handle this type of
problem. In these institutes the knowledge necessary for the change of these
problems can be created through the use of the Compram methodology which has
been developed specifically for handling complex societal problems. Global
Safety is a container concept referring to various threats such as HIV/Aids, floods and terrorism;
threats with different causes and different effects. These dangers threaten
people, the global economy and the stability of states. It would be more
appropriate to develop policy related to these issues by utilizing the
approaches, methods and tools that have been developed for complex societal
problems.
Prof.
dr. Fred Wenstøp of the Department of Strategy and Logistics of the Norwegian
School of Management in Oslo Norway pointed the way to Kenneth
Boulding who had a vision in 1966
of OR as a tool for benevolent decision making, where rationality and computer
power joined forces to develop efficient and therefore ethical methods to save
‘spaceship earth’. OR and Ethics literature is now devoted to this purpose,
where MCDA and System Dynamics are examples of methods used. The other major
branch is development and implementation of Guidelines for the practice of OR.
Occasionally the two meet in efforts to develop specific guidelines that, if
followed, will lead to good consequences.
In parallel, a debate is going on about where is the proper place of
Ethics in OR. Should ethics somehow enter the models, or should it be kept
outside to preserve the scientific ideals and relegated to the OR process? The
literature in OR and Ethics draws heavily on other fields such as Decision
Sciences, Psychology, Sociology, Economics, Theory of Organization and
Management, and does not itself have a core set of concepts or methods.
Prof.
dr. Alexander Makarenko of the Institute
for Applied System Analysis
of the National
Technical University of Ukraine (KPI) in Kiev
Ukraine talks about
the new models
of society proposed by him and his colleagues as the source of handling new
mathematical problems and phenomena. The models had been formulated as
discrete dynamical systems with presumable multivalued solutions including the
models of opinion formation in geographically distributed social systems: GIS.
The models are new and interesting as in applications as well as in the
development of social systems theory. Examples are the next: game 'Life' with
anticipation; cellular automata models of crowd’s movement; neural network
models of society. Such calculations help to illustrate the new presumable
types of solutions in such mathematical objects. The list of topics is the
next: mathematical modeling of social processes; decisionmaking; sustainable
development; complexity, brain and consciousness, micro-world, Universe.
Dr
Annette Hohenberger of the Middle
East Technical University Institute of Applied Mathematics and Informatics
Institute ODTU Ankara
in Turkey talked about the cognitive
perspectives on climate change and sustainability. The problems related to
climate change and the striving for sustainable development have been approach
as ecological, economical, and technological problems that mainly have
political and engineering solutions. however the problem of climate change
include also social, cultural, philosophical, psychological, and cognitive
aspects. So these sciences contribute to a broad and comprehensive analysis of
a problem the solution of which concerns all of humanity as its major
problem-owner: It is foremost humans who will be struck by climate change.
Hohenberger discussed in how far the human cognitive system is apt at tackling
and solving the problem, on various levels of organizational complexity,
individual and collective. She wants to open the floor to an interdisciplinary
discussion with the various workshop members, extending into the following
EURO-OR conferences on climate change for multi disciplinary points of view.
Dr.
Honora Smith of the University of Southampton in UK talked about location
theory and other aspects of optimisation that contribute to sustainability of
healthcare facilities in developing countries. In this respect, healthcare
facilities might consist of a number of health workers in villages who can
deliver a service to their neighbours or those from surrounding villages using
a mobile health clinic, a field
center, a community healthcare
centre giving basic primary health care in a remote rural region that can
contribute to establishing sustainable facilities. However, many difficulties
arise of applying solutions at the point of decision making. Experience has
shown that contacting and collaborating with planners in these areas is hard
to initiate and follow through.
Dr. Dorien DeTombe
Chair International Research Society on Methodology of Societal Complexity
P.O. Box. 3286, 1001 AB Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Europe
Tel: +31 20 6927526
E-Mail: DeTombe@nosmo.nl ; http://www.geocities.com/doriendetombe
©Dorien J. DeTombe, All rights reserved, first created September 2009