State
of the Art Workshop
Societal
Complexity
2009
Volume
Dorien
DeTombe & Gerhard-Wilhelm Weber Editors
organized by
Methodology of Societal Complexity,
OR for Developing
Countries,
Ethics &
Centre for Business Analytics
The 23rd European Conference on Operational Research
University
of Applied Sciences, Remagen, Germany, Europe
July 5, 2009
State of the Art Workshop Societal
Complexity 2009
Dorien DeTombe & Gerhard-Wilhelm Weber (Editors)
EURO XXIII Conference Bonn Germany Europe
July 5 2009
23 European
Conference on Operational Research
Volume
20
ã
Greenhill & Waterfront, Dorien J. DeTombe
Publisher:
Greenhill & Waterfront, Europe: Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Guilford, UK
North-America: Montreal, Canada
greenhillwaterfront@hotmail.com
ISBN
/EAN
978-90-77171-29-5
Version
001, 13 pages, June 2009
Nur
916
Language
English
10 Euro
State of the Art Workshop
Societal
Complexity
2009
Volume
19
Dorien
DeTombe & Gerhard-Wilhelm Weber Editors
organized by
Methodology of Societal Complexity,
OR for Developing
Countries,
Ethics &
Centre for Business Analytics
Mutual
session of
Euro Working Groups of
the Operational Research Society
The 23rd European Conference on Operational Research
University of
Applied Sciences, Fachhochschule Koblenz,RheinAhrCampus Remagen, Suedallee 2, D-53424 Remagen, Germany, Europe
July 5, 2009
State of the Art Workshop
Societal
Complexity
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.
Program
10.00
– 10.05 Opening of the session by Prof. dr. Dorien DeTombe
10.05
-10.25
Prof. dr. Cathal Brugha
10.25
-10.45 Prof. dr. Gerhard Wilhelm Weber
10.45
-11.05
Prof. dr. Dorien DeTombe
11.05
-11.25
Prof. dr. Fred Westrop
11.25
-11.45
Break
11.45 -12.05 Dr. Annette Hohenberger
12.05
-12.25
Prof.
dr.
Alexander Makarenko
12.25
-12.45
Dr.
Honora Smit
12.45
-13.05
Discussion
guided by Prof. dr. Gerhard Wilhelm Weber
13.05
-13.15
Closing remarks by Prof.
dr. Cathal Brugha
China's
Relations with Europe
Prof.
dr. Cathal M. Brugha
Centre
for Business Analytics
Quinn
School of Business
University
College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland
Tel:
716-4708 Email: Cathal.Brugha@ucd.ie website: mis.ucd.ie/staff/cbrugha
This
paper proposes a pathway to China’s Globalisation and International
Integration through co-operation with Europe.
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.
We then consider China’s attitude to Europe and its historical and
cultural similarities with Europe.
We
give reasons why China might wish to strengthen its relationship with Europe.
We discuss the potential obstacles to such a plan, including the need
to build inter-cultural trust.
Having
first put the case, the paper uses decision science frameworks to provide an
overview of the issues and challenges involved.
On
Two New Contributions to Data Mining by and within of Modern Operations
Research by Optimization Theory and Computational Statistics
Prof.
dr.Gerhard Wilhelm Weber
Middle
East Technical University
Institute of Applied Mathematics
ODTU
Ankara
06531 Turkiye
Tel: 90 - 312- 210- 5652 Fax: 90 - 312- 210- 2985
gweber@metu.edu.tr
In this
presentation, we demonstrate the beauty of OR hosted and supported Data
Mining, which became a vivid discipline with a growing number of important
applications in science, technology and social sciences. In fact, we motivate
and present 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 may serve to make some more
"appetite" to vivid modern OR and to discussions at the Remagen
state-of-the-art workshop.
Global safety
Prof.
dr. Dorien DeTombe
Chair International Research Society on
Methodology of Societal Complexity
P.O. Box. 3286, NL-1001 AB
Tel: +31 20 6927526
DeTombe@nosmo.nl
http://www.geocities.com/DorienDeTombe
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.
Policy making for this kind of threats often lack an overview of the real
causes and the interventions are based on a too shallow analysis of the
problem, mono-disciplinary and
focus
mostly only on the effects. 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.
Handling
these complex societal problems should be done multidisciplinary in stead of
mono-disciplinary. In order to give politicians the opportunity to handle
complex problems multidisciplinary, multidisciplinary research institutes
should be created. These multidisciplinary research institutes would 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. In a six step approach,
experts, actors and policymakers discuss the content of the problem and the
possible changes. The framework method uses interviewing, the Group Decision
Room, simulation models and scenario’s in a cooperative way. The methodology
emphasizes the exchange of knowledge and understanding by communication among
and between the experts, actors and politicians meanwhile keeping emotion in
mind. The Compram methodology will be further explained in relation to global
safety in regard to terrorism, economy, health care and agriculture.
Keywords:
Compram methodology, global safety, multidisciplinary research institute,
policy making, OECD, terrorism, economy, health care, agriculture, complex
societal problem.
State of the art in OR and ethics
Prof.
dr. Fred Wenstøp
Department
chair, Department of Strategy and Logistics
Norwegian School of Management BI
Nydalsveien 37, 0483 Oslo, Post address 0442 Oslo, Norway
fred.wenstop@bi.no
Tel +47 46 41 04 93
Kenneth
Boulding 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’. I major branch of the
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.
New Mathematical Models of Social Systems and their Applications
Dr. Poveshenko G., Prof. dr. Makarenko A.,
dr.
Samorodov E.
Institute
for Applied System Analysis
Prospect
Pobedy, 37, 03056, Kyiv-56,
New
models of society proposed by authors have been considered as the source of
new mathematical problems and phenomena. The models had been formulated as
discrete dynamical systems with presumable multivalued solutions. Also the
models of opinion formation in geographically distributed social systems are
described. The models are new and interesting as in applications as in the
development of social systems theory. The GIS application for real modeling is
described.
So
in proposed talk we pose some examples of such new models and new types of
their behavior as mathematical objects. First of all we describe the results
on numerical calculations of behavior of some such models. Some of the
examples are the next: game 'Life' with anticipation; cellular automata models
of crowd’s movement; neural network models of society etc. Such calculations
help to illustrate the new presumable types of solutions in such mathematical
objects. (multivalued periodic solutions, multivalued chaos, etc).
Also
the review of presumable applications and interpretations of such models in
different fields are described. The list of topics is the next: mathematical
modeling of social processes; decision – making; sustainable development;
complexity, brain and consciousness, micro-world, Universe.
Keywords:
Society models, Opinion formation, Multivaluedness, Dynamical systems,
GIS
Cognitive perspectives on climate change and
sustainability
Dr Annette Hohenberger
Middle
East Technical University
Institute of Applied Mathematics,
Informatics Institute
ODTU
Ankara
06531 Turkey
hohenberger@ii.metu.edu.tr
Hitherto
it has seemed that the problems related to climate change and the striving for
sustainable development are ecological, economical, and technological problems
that mainly have political and engineering solutions.
Meanwhile, also the social, cultural, philosophical, psychological, and
cognitive sciences have started to 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. It may dramatically affect the life of billions of people in various
respects: their sheer existence, level of economical subsistence, pursuit of
happiness, family planning, work, personal life-style, attitudes, etc.
In
this talk, I will develop a decidedly cognitive perspective on those topics. I
will discuss in how far the human cognitive system is apt or inapt at tackling
and solving the problem, on various levels of organizational complexity,
individual and collective.
Humans
are endowed with the highest developed cognitive system in nature, comprising
astonishing abilities of perception, conception, thought, language, learning,
memory, reasoning, and action. Selected areas of cognitive research related to
these abilities that are particularly relevant in the present context are:
(1)
Rational
decision making in the face of uncertainty
(Tversky and Kahnemann 1974): When we reason about the likelihood of an event
to happen, humans are prone to several well-known biases, such as the bias of representativeness. Events that are unrepresentative of a class of
events are judged to be less likely to happen. Since climate change is an
unprecedented event (in its order or magnitude), it is unrepresentative of the
class of future events, therefore people tend to ignore or downplay it.
(2)
We basically have two systems of risk perception and risk behavior (Weber 2006):
a.
Risk as a feeling: an association and affect-driven hard-wired system that evokes fast,
automatic, visceral reactions, in particular through recent, personal
experience
b.
Risk as a computation: an analytic system that relies on formal logic, Bayesian statistics,
probability calculus, that works slowly. It can be used deliberately and
consciously by humans but lacks any affective support
Since
climate change is not (yet) directly perceptible, the first risk system does
not currently warn us about the threat that is ahead of us; only the second
risk system can do that.
(3)
The
human attention system: If a risk, such as climate change, has entered
into the center of our attention, typically a single short-term action is
taken, often an individual strategy that is hopelessly “under-complex” (Welzer
2008), such as switching the light off in the dining room more often.
Furthermore, we can only attend to a “finite pool of worry” (Baron 2006)
whose content may change while its overall extent is limited.
(4)
Shifting
baselines
(Welzer
2008): Humans tend to consider those states of the environment as “normal”
that coincide with their lifetime experience. Even across a single generation
baselines shift so that, for example, extreme weather conditions in the future
may appear normal and expected while they were considered exceptional and
threatening in the past.
(5)
Proactive
thought, abstract projectuality, mental time travel, and
reverse-engineering,
(Bar 2007,
Amati and Shallice 2008, Suddendorf and Corballis 2007): Among all species
humans have the highest capacities of conceiving of and planning into the
future. We can go on a “mental time travel” and anticipate possible future
states though deliberate thought processes. Likewise, we can engage in
“reverse-engineering” and identify actions that would lead to desired
future states, such as sustainable development.
(6)
The
human action system
interfaces with perceptual, memory, motivational,
and affective systems. For actions on a short- and medium time scale, these
coordinated systems can rely on existing hard-ware (brain circuits) and
automatically operating soft-ware (mental systems). A huge challenge for the
human cognitive system faced with climate change and sustainability is that
causes and effects are temporally and spatially disrupted. Therefore, we are
facing a global scaling-problem: is
it sufficient to just scale up our cognitive abilities to encompass large
scale problems or do we need basic changes in the design of our mental
faculties? If so, how may this happen in the short period of time that is left
for a solution?
(7)
The necessity for a global impact
fosters systemic thinking and distributed
cognition: Any solution to those problems must stem from a concerted
effort of all of humanity, through bottom-up and top-down processes. Single
individuals acting locally, as in grass-root movements, can make a global
impact. Companies, institutions, countries, and inter-governmental
organizations can act on a global level, as individuals.
With
this selective review of relevant topics from a cognitive science perspective
on climate change and sustainability I want to open the floor to an
interdisciplinary discussion with the various workshop members, extending into
the following EURO-OR conference.
References:
Amati, Daniele and
Shallice, Tim (2007): On the emergence of modern humans.
Cognition 103,
358-385.
Bar, Moshe (2007):
The proactive brain: using analogies and associations to generate predictions.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11, 7, 280-289.
Baron, J. (2006):
Thinking about global warming. Climatic Change (special issue on
"The psychology of long term risk" edited by A. Todorov and M.
Oppenheimer), 77, 137-150.
Suddendorf, Thomas
and Corballis, Michael C. (2007): The evolution of foresight: What is
mental time travel and is it unique to humans? Behavioral and Brain
Sciences, 30, 299-313.
Tversky, Amos and
Kahneman, Daniel (1974): Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases.
Science
185 (4157), 1124-1131.
Weber, Elke (2006):
Experience-based and description-based perceptions of long-term risks: Why
global warming does not scare us (yet).
Climatic
Change 77, 103-120.
Welzer, Harald (2008):
Klimakriege.
Wofür im 21. Jahrhundert getötet wird. Frankfurt: Fischer.
Health
facilities in developing countries: location for sustainability
Dr.
Honora Smith
University of Southampton
My
interest is in 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. A mobile health clinic could be routed around an
area to offer medically trained help from different premises. A field centre
could be operated by a hospital in a region where residents have little
opportunity to access quality healthcare, offering temporary but regular
access to procedures such as cataract removel. A community healthcare centre
could be established giving basic primary health care in a remote rural region.
In all these situations, optimisation theory can offer solutions in areas such
as location and vehicle routeing 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.
See
for Program of
State
of the Art Workshop Societal Complexity Bonn 2009
See
Report Bonn 2009 of
State of the
Art Workshop
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 June 2009