Methodology
of Societal Complexity
Global Safety & Sustainable Development & Healthcare 2
EURO XXIII Conference Bonn
Germany Europe
July 5-8, 2009
23rd European
Conference on Operational Research
Volume 18
Dorien DeTombe (Editor)
Complex Societal Issues: Global Safety
& Sustainable Development & Healthcare 2
EURO
XXIII Conference Bonn Germany Europe
July
5-8, 2009
23 European
Conference on Operational Research
Volume 18
Dorien DeTombe (Editor)
ã Greenhill & Waterfront, Dorien J. DeTombe
Publisher: Greenhill & Waterfront, Europe: Amsterdam, The Netherlands;
Guilford, UK North-America: Montreal, Canada
greenhillwaterfront@hotmail.com
ISBN /EAN 978-90-77171-28-8
Version 001, 19 pages, March 2009
Nur 916
Language English
10 Euro
Complex Societal Issues
Methodology
Global
Safety & Sustainable Development & Healthcare 2
EURO XXIII in
Bonn Germany, Europe
July
5-8 2009
23 European Conference on
Operational Research
Volume 18
Dorien DeTombe (Editor)
EURO
XXIII in
July
5-8, 2009
23
European Conference
on
Operational Research
Methodology
of Societal Complexity
Chair: Dorien J. DeTombe,
International Research Society on
Methodology of Societal Complexity
Euro working Group on Methodology of
Societal Complexity
P.O.
Box. 3286, 1001 AB Amsterdam,
The
E-Mail:
DeTombe@nosmo.nl
http://www.geocities.com/doriendetombe
The
subject of Methodology Handling Complex Societal Issues:
Global
Safety is a container concept referring to various phenomena. Although all
dangers are in essence man made they can be categorized as natural threats and
man made threats, local and global threats. Global natural threats are threats
caused by viruses like the flu pandemic, bird plague and HIV/Aids. Local
natural threats are threats such as hurricanes, avalanches, floods, tsunamis
and earthquakes. Man made global threats are threats like terrorism, increased
CO2 emissions and threats caused by internet use and manipulations of stock
exchanges. Climate change seems to be a combination of natural and man made
threats. Man made local threats are wars, terrorism, traffic, pollution,
nuclear power plants and agricultural business threats like such as Bovine
Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE). Safety is, next to food and sleep, one of our
most basic needs for living. We organize our democratic societies in such a
way that the government takes care of our daily safety. In order to create a
safer society one needs to know from where the danger comes and what causes
the threats. Each threat has different causes and different effects on
different elements in society. A careful analysis of the situation is needed
to see the causes and effects, to see which elements are involved and how they
are related, to see which power groups are involved and to determine which
package of sustainable changes can have the desired effect. In order to be
able to find out what we know about the problem, who is effected by it, which
parties are involved, who benefits and who suffers, what emotions and
political vulnerability are going on, one has to analyze the problem
thoroughly through a multidisciplinary approach. A multidisciplinary group of
knowledge experts should analyze the situation and discuss possible changes.
Then actors should discuss the issue and give their opinion on the situation.
Together the experts and actors should find fruitful changes. The
interventions should be carefully implemented and evaluated based on their
desired effect on the problem. Each complex societal problem has knowledge,
power and emotional elements. Handling societal problems in a
multidisciplinary way has become a must for our society, and needs a special
approach. The challenge is to combine knowledge from the social sciences,
various technologies and the natural sciences in such a way that new knowledge
and insights are created.
The
problems confronting society are difficult to handle. There is a growing gap
between the complexity of these problems, the need for interdisciplinarity and
the way that knowledge development has been organized. Consider for example
the organization of our universities into specialized departments by
discipline. There is a need for better methods and tools, more knowledge and
more imagination, and more interdisciplinary work. Scientific knowledge is
needed to survive and over come these problems. Therefore the development of
methodology for working with complex societal problems has become a needed
field for scientific attention. This relatively new field combines knowledge
from different sciences. Some of the scientific and real life reasons for this
special approach are that complex societal problems are seldom completely
defined, change during their development, involve many actors each with
different views of the problem, with different interests and with different
‘solutions’ in mind. These problems have large impacts on society and
involve huge amounts of money.
Methodology of Handling Societal Complexity focuses on methods and tools for analyzing, structuring, guiding and evaluating complex societal problems. Complex societal problems are unstructured, dynamical and constantly changing problems. Each problem has knowledge, power and emotional aspects and has a large impact on macro, meso and on micro level of the society.
Handling
complex societal problems needs a multidisciplinary approach. The content
knowledge comes from content experts. The process knowledge for handling the
problem comes from facilitators. The attention of the research group is on the
methods and tools facilitators need for supporting these kinds of problems.
The facilitators use methods specially created for the field of societal
problems combined with methods and insights derived from their original field
like medicine, law, economics, societal sciences, methodology, mathematics,
computer sciences, technology, engineering sciences, chaos theory and
operational research. Often a combination of methods is needed. In this way
the field uses all kind of methods from social sciences and operational
research. An often-used approach is simulation. A simulation model is one of
the powerful tools to describe societal complexity. With simulation models one
cannot only understand the causal relations between the phenomena but also see
what effect changes have.
The
set of lectures focuses on methodology for handling real life complexity with
extra attention to the subject of global safety, sustainable development and
healthcare
Key words: Methodology, Complex Societal Issues, Decisions, Sustainable Development, Global Safety, Healthcare
Stream:
Methodology of Societal Complexity
Session I: Societal Complexity
and Safety
Chair session: Dr. Dorien J. DeTombe
International Research Society on
Methodology of Societal Complexity
Chair Euro Working Group on
Methodology of Societal Complexity
P.O. Box. 3286, 1001 AB Amsterdam,
The
E-Mail:
DeTombe@nosmo.nl
http://www.geocities.com/doriendetombe
Session II: Societal Complexity and Sustainable Development A
Chair
session: Prof. Dr. Cathal M. Brugha
Department of Management Information Systems,
University College Dublin, Belfield,
Cathal.brugha@ucd.ie, http://mis.ucd.ie/CMSS
Tel.+353-1-716-4708
Session
III: Societal Complexity and Healthcare
Chair
session:
Dr. Ingvill
C. Mochmann, GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Bachemer
Str. 40, D-50931 Cologne, Germany.
Email:
Session IV: Societal Complexity and Sustainable Development B
Chair session: Prof. dr. Ludmilla Koshlai
Glushkov Institute of Cybernetics
Department of Mathematical Cybernetics
e-mail: koshlai@ukr.net
Abstracts
Session I: Societal Complexity
and Safety
Stream:
Methodology of Societal Complexity
Chair
session: Dr. Dorien J. DeTombe
International Research Society on
Methodology of Societal Complexity
Chair Euro Working Group on
Methodology of Societal Complexity
P.O. Box. 3286, 1001 AB Amsterdam,
The
E-Mail:
DeTombe@nosmo.nl
http://www.geocities.com/doriendetombe
Session
I-1: Societal Complexity and Safety
Operations
Research techniques of rare use and catastrophes
Dr.María J. García G.
Minimax Consultores C. A. Gerencia General.
Apartado 78239. Caracas 1074
Venezuela.
&
Dr. José G. Hernández R.
Universidad
Metropolitana, Departamento de Gestión de la tecnología.
Caracas
Venezuela.
The contribution of this work is to present some Operations Research techniques, rarely highlighted in the literature and that could be of great help to the communities confronting a catastrophe. Therefore, the objective of the work are: To describe the use of: Fuzzy set theory; Decreasing digits; A, B, C, Model; Structure of decision trees; Multiattribute Models (MM) with multiplicative factors and Matrixes Of Weighing (MOW) to construct systems of support that help in case of catastrophes.
Key words: Catastrophes, Fuzzy Set, Decreasing Digits, A, B, C Model, Decision Trees, Multiattribute Models, Matrixes of Weighing.
Session I -2:
Societal Complexity and Safety
Reflexions on the Credit Crisis
Ir.Wim
Smit
Smart
Business Center
HAN
University, Arnhem, The Netherlands
E-mail:
wim.smit@han.nl
In
this paper attention is given to the ongoing credit crisis which is showing
itself in more and more parts of the economy. Although the credit crisis most
likely started way before 2007 most economists see the sharp rise of the
number of defaulters of prime mortgages in the USA as the start of the present
crisis. Since mid 2008 an ongoing reshuffling of the financial industry in the
USA has been taken place with injection of very large sums of government money
into banks, insurance companies and other financial institutes. However, these
measures did not prevent that the USA is now already for some quarters in a
recession. Moreover, companies started to lay off employees in big numbers and
especially the automotive industry is now hurt in a serious way, and asked
also recently financial support to the government. With less spending power of
the majority of the USA population other segments of the economy will also be
hurt and it is hoped that somewhere in the near future a kind of new
equilibrium will be found at a lower GDP, at a higher unemployment number, at
a lower consumption level, at a lower dollar value, and of course a lower
quality of life. And since mid 2008 it became visible that many countries in
other continents also were hurt by the credit crisis and their economies also
entered into a recession. Is the credit crisis the start of the end of the
deregulated capitalism? Or will the credit crisis start crises in other areas
of the world wide human society? Or is the credit crisis a sign of a change in
the geopolitical situation of the world powers? It all are questions which are
dealt with in this paper.
Key
words:
Credit
Crisis, USA, future
Session I-3: Societal Complexity and Safety
A Proposal of Primal and Dual Problems in
Macro-Economics
Dr. Eizo Kinoshita
While
the prolonged recession Japan has experienced during the last fifteen years,
and the global downfall in stock prices triggered by the 2008 US sub-prime
loan crisis, both adversely affected general consumers, the two events also
presented significant difficulties within the study of economics.
Macro-economics was born from the Great Depression, a prolonged slump that
originated in the
This discovery is termed the “primal problem and dual problem in macro-economics”, a version of an expression quite common in OR (Operations Research). The introduction of this concept into conventional macro-economics establishes a tidy system. This system is the primal problem and dual problem of linear programming that embraces several important factors developed independently since the 1930s (Author’s proposal).
In brief, there are two different phases (the primal and dual problems) in economics. In the primal problem phase, capital expenditures of private corporations grow, creating an impetus towards the maximization of profits (the spirit of capitalism, as explained by Max Weber). In this case, as Adam Smith once wrote, the “invisible hand of God” works to lead the economy to a significant growth.
However, once every few decades a bubble economy pops up in a complicated web of dreams and desires in the private sector and eventually bursts. This is when the economy enters the dual problem phase. With this, the value of property purchased on credit during the bubble period collapses, and the efficiency of investment drops below the market interest rate for corporations with debt. As a result, as described by Max Weber, corporations stay away from capital expenditure and aim to minimize debt rather than maximize profits. In other words, during the dual problem phase in macro-economics, the goal of corporations shifts from maximization of profit to minimization of debt, leading the economy to shrink.
This paper formulates the above two phases (the primal and dual problems in macro-economics) by treating them as primal and dual problems of linear programming, and describes their meaning (Author’s proposal). In the process, the paper shows that important economic factors in the two phases in fact form dualisms in their respective areas (Author’s proposal).
Session I-4:
Societal Complexity and Safety
Credit crisis and
Global Safety
Dr. Dorien
J.
DeTombe (MSc. Ph.D.)
Chair
Euro working Group on Methodology of Societal Complexity
P.O.
Box. 3286, 1001 AB
Tel: +31 20 6927526
6927526
DeTombe@nosmo.nl
http://www.geocities.com/DorienDeTombe
The
credit crisis is a complex societal problem in which many phenomena, people
and actors are involved. Analyzing the causes of the phenomena, stabilizing
the financial system and preventing new fall backs needs a multi-disciplinary
analysis. Theories of many disciplines should be used to analyze this issue
and to make decisions. This can be done by the Compram methodology (DeTombe).
The
credit crisis, started in the USA, is grown out from a local to a global
crisis. In a globalized and intertwined financial system, where insurance
companies and bank systems loan each other enormous amounts of money and in
which gambling on the stock market seems to be the normal procedure, a local
crisis can evolve fast into a global crisis. Men in charge of these financial
businesses earn enormous amounts of private money, and are very much respected
and admired. Meanwhile they act ruthless having only their own benefit in mind
and careless of that of others. This resulted in a world wide downfall of
stock markets, dragging millions of people into misery by losing their jobs,
most of their assets and their pension plans.States are no longer capable of,
or are not willing to, protect their own people against the greediness and
irresponsible behaviour of these global financial gamblers, who mostly act
within the legal system with their hedge funds, private equities and naked
short sellings. The possibility of this behaviour creates a threat to the
economic balance and stability in the states, between the states and in the
world and by this a threat to global safety.
Now
states have to pay for the debts, while many of the people who caused the
trouble still have their huge amounts of money. This is again an example of
privatizing the benefits and socializing the debts.The Compram methodology is
a framework methodology for policy making which includes many methods and
tools. The Compram methodology is specialized to handle complex
interdisciplinary worldwide problems and to offer a step-by-step approach of
analyzing the problem and to find and implement sustainable decisions. The
Compram methodology offers a bird’s-eye view on the complexity of the
problem and gives direction to policy makers to build their decisions on.
Key words:
Credit Crisis, Economy, Complex
Societal Problems, Global Safety, Compram
Methodology
Session I -5 :
Societal Complexity and Safety
A System
Dynamics Approach
for Implementing ISO
The Industry’s Perspective
Mr.
Ijaz
Yusuf
Assistant
Professor of
&
Principal Consultant Quality Circle Institute,
E-mail:qci14000@hotmail.com Email: ijaz.yusuf@umt.edu.pk
Tel: +92-42-7841877
Experimenting
with the mental model, this paper attempts to formulate the practical means
for implementing the ISO
System Dynamics is a powerful management tool which helps in analyzing industrial problems through constructing computer models of the underlying decision systems and experimenting with them.
Key words: ISO 14000, Environment Impact, Environment Aspect, System dynamics, Environment Management System, policy design
Session I-6 :
Societal Complexity and Safety
Modeling of Large City Problems under Credit Crisis
Prof. dr. Ludmilla Koshlai
Glushkov Institute of Cybernetics
Department of Mathematical Cybernetics
e-mail: koshlai@ukr.net
&
Prof. dr. Mikhail Mikhalevich
Department of Systems Analysis
e-mail:
mmihalevich@ukr.net,
mmikhalevich@mail.ru
The global crisis hurt now practically all countries, but its consequences are especially difficult for countries in transition. The interaction of credit crisis and inadequate development of market infrastructure in post-socialist countries has been generated a number of additional interrelated economic, social, ecological and technical problems, which concentrate within the suburban area of large cities, when intensive labour migrations, both legal and illegal, took place during the pre-crisis boom. Many people, who expected to find the better life in large city and earn money for their families, are job-less and hope-less, they are especially quickly criminalized and marginalized. Deep recession raises serious budgetary problems for local authorities. Growth of number of unfinished buildings also creates a new scope of problems. In essence, these problems are typical examples of complex societal problems and Compram method could be applied for their solution.
The
classification of areas in large city and its suburbs play the important role
for the first Compram sub-cycle; methods of fuzzy set theory, ordinary
regression and hierarchy analysis can be applied for these purposes. An
important advantage of this approach is the possibility to take into account
imperfect, weakly structured information, in particular the ordinal expert
estimations. The generalization of “gravitation” model was constructed for
these purposes. Several risk and uncertainty factors are handled; generalized
gradient methods of nondifferentiable, multicriteria and stochastic
optimization have been applied for model calculations. These calculations have
been done for the situation arisen in
The approach suggested is universal enough. It could be applied towards the research of crisis processes in a large city together with suburban area for both transition and market economy countries.
Key words: Credit Crisis, Complex Societal Problems, Compram, Hierarchy Analysis, Optimization.
Session II:
Societal Complexity and Sustainable
Development A
Stream:
Methodology of Societal Complexity
Chair
session: Prof. Dr. Cathal M. Brugha
Department of Management Information Systems
University College Dublin, Belfield,
Cathal.brugha@ucd.ie, http://mis.ucd.ie/CMSS
Tel.+353-1-716-4708
Session II-1: Societal Complexity and Sustainable Development A
Ethical
Aspects of Societal Complexity: The Contribution of Discourse Ethics
Prof. Dr. John Mingers
Director
of
http://www.kent.ac.uk/kbs/staff_detail.php?page_id=15&ID=83
With globalization, environmental problems and significant failures in
corporate governance, ethics is perceived to be of increasing importance. This
is particularly so at this time because of the huge social effects
of new technologies and the increasing power of transnational corporations.
This paper argues that Habermas’s discourse ethics can make a significant,
and practical, contribution. After outlining some major ethical theories and
how they have been interpreted in business ethics, the paper details the
development of discourse ethics. Discourse ethics is different from other
approaches to ethics as it is grounded in actual debates between those
affected by decisions and proposals. Recognizing that the theory is rather
abstract, the final section discusses how it can be pragmatized, with the help
of existing soft and critical OR/Systems methodologies, to become a basis
for decision making on complex societal issues.
Key
words: Ethics, Societal Complexity, Habermas
Session II-2:
Methodology for Sustainable Development A
OR Creating Competitive
Advantage
Prof.
Dr. Cathal M. Brugha
Department of Management Information Systems,
Cathal.brugha@ucd.ie, http://mis.ucd.ie/CMSS
Tel.+353-1-716-4708
We show that sustainable development requires balance between one’s subjective position and objective realities, and between one’s inner world and outer world. These form a meta-structure based on four dimensions that operate embedded within one another: Adjusting Self within Adjusting World, within Convincing, within Committing. We use the model to show that for development to be sustainable it must follow reverse processes: adapting in the face of objective realities as in conflict resolution, evincing appropriate world views, and inducing what is best for long term success. We show that the model applies equally to personal as well as societal development.
Key words: Systems Methodology, Nomology, Decision Science, Philosophy
Session II-3: Societal Complexity and Sustainable Development A
Goodwill hunting: how to allocate bets or
disagreeable chores
Prof. dr. Lorenzo Cioni, Giorgio Gallo
Computer
Science Department,
largo Pontecorvo 3, 56127, Pisa, Italy
lcioni@di.unipi.it,
gallo@di.unipi.it
One of the hardest problems to solve in distributive contexts is to decide how to allocate to one agents from a set of selected agents a bad or a disagreeable chore.
This is the type of problem which is encountered when one has to decide the localization of a controversial or dangerous plant (such as incinerators, waste dumps, chemical plants, oil refineries and the like) whose realization affects a well defined area, but whose effects may cover much wider areas. More generally it is the problem of territorial planning, that is how to allocate activities and to decide about the possible uses of the soils.
In the present paper we present a solution based on the use of the auction mechanism. For this purpose we propose three mechanisms that extend the auction mechanism, so to have an auctioneer (the decision maker that carry out the allocation) that proposes chore to a set bidders (the decision makers that must compete among themselves for its implementation) through one of the following three mechanisms, the first two of multi shots type and the latter of one shot type.
1. The auctioneer offers the chore and a sum of money raises the offer (from an initial starting value up to an upper bound M, the maximum he/she is willing to pay) until one of the bidders accepts it getting both the chore and the money. The auction ends when either one of the bidders calls “stop” or the auctioneer reaches none of the bidders calling “stop”.
2. The auctioneer offers the chore and fixes a starting sum of money L (the maximum he/she is willing to pay). The bidders start making lower and lower bids. The bidder who bid less gets the chore and the money. Of course the auctioneer has no lower bound. Under the hypothesis that the bidders are not willing to pay for getting the chore we can suppose a lower bound l= 0. If this hypothesis is removed we can, at least in principle, have negative bids. We may have a void auction sale if no bidders accepts the initial value L. The auctioneer can avoid this by fixing a high enough value L.
3. The auctioneer offers the chore and the bidders bid money for not getting it under the proviso that the one who bids less will get the chore whereas the bids of the others will be used to form a monetary compensation for the loser. Also in this case it is possible to have a void auction sale. this case the selected bidders can choose to pay a fee so to avoid the auction and these fees are used as a further compensation for the losing bidder.
The paper frames these three mechanisms within the general context of Auction Theory. It also presents the existing relations among the proposed mechanisms, describes their properties and proposes some descriptive algorithms or recipes.
The paper closes with a section devoted to the applications of the proposed auction mechanisms to real world allocation problems as well as a section devoted to possible extensions and refinements.
Key
words: Auctions, Allocation, Bets, Chores, Fairness,
Compensations
Session
III: Societal Complexity and Healthcare
Chair
session:
Dr. Ingvill
C. Mochmann,
GESIS
– Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences
Bachemer
Str. 40, D-50931 Cologne,
Germany. Email: ingvill.mochmann@gesis.org
Session III-1: Societal Complexity and
Healthcare
The
Complexity of Healthcare Handled by Clients
with
the Aid of Internet
Dr.
Cor van Dijkum, Marja Bouman, Dini Glas, Niek Reus, Herman Snijders, Laura
Vegter
NetCliënten
After
the Second World War democratization, information technology and globalization
changed healthcare. Democratization made that those clients from an object of
treatment by professionals became active participants in healthcare.
Globalization brought the free market place closer to choices clients made for
services. Information technology accelerated the way knowledge was accumulated
and communicated by medical sciences, medical practitioners and clients.
Healthcare became a domain in which different actors work together, society is
more and more involved, knowledge of different scientific disciplines is used
and new information technology speeds up the exchange of information. That had
as a consequence that the field became complex and difficult to handle.
However with E-health it is articulated that the use of information technology
on the other hand can improve the handling of the complexity of healthcare.
For
example: in a number of research studies indications are found that healthcare
facilitated by information technologies improve the care. However the evidence
was not quite strong, also because the used research designs were not always
suited for E-health. An overview of those research designs leads to the
conclusion that for complex situations in which a number of actors is involved,
action-research is more suited for E-health, particularly when clients are
viewed as serious partners in healthcare.
An
example of action-research in mental healthcare in The Netherlands illustrates
this. The starting points of this project were, among others:
(1)
Build a website on which decision support systems are developed that support
(ex) clients in making better decisions about
professional help and mastering again their life again as a citizen of
society;
(2)
Develop those decision support systems with the aid of all useful knowledge,
particularly with knowledge that is distilled from the experiences of (ex)
clients.
The
project also shows that a partnership between professionals and clients can be
beneficial for both actors.
Key words: E-health,
Decision Support
Session
III-2: Societal Complexity and Healthcare
Children born of war
and the COMPRAM methodology
Dr.
Ingvill C. Mochmann, GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences
Bachemer
Str. 40, D-50931 Cologne Germany.
Email: ingvill.mochmann@gesis.org
&
Dr. Dorien J. DeTombe
International Research Society on
Methodology of Societal Complexity
Chair Euro Working Group 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
There
have always been children born during and after conflicts and wars, where the
father has been a member of an enemy, allied or peacekeeping force and the
mother a local citizen. Knowledge available so far indicates that many of
these children are born with a stigma of belonging to the enemy and are, among
others, often more likely to be exposed to poverty, infanticide, lack of
citizenship and lack of education than other children. However, little
attention is paid to this particular group of children and their complex
situation during and after wars and conflicts by authorities and humanitarian
organisations. This paper will analyse children born of war using the COMPRAM
methodology suggesting which steps and implementations may be of particular
relevance to secure the human rights of this vulnerable group. The COMPRAM
methodology is multi disciplined, multi level, multi actor methodology based
on the theory of societal complexity that gives guidelines to handle real life
complex societal problems. Handling according to the COMPRAM methodology
supports defining and changing a complex societal problem in a sustainable way.
In a six step approach experts, actors and policymakers discuss the content of
the problem and the possible changes. This framework methodology 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.
Key
words: Children Born of War, Societal Complexity, COMPRAM Methodology
Session
III-3: Societal Complexity and Healthcare
Economic
impact of new malaria diagnostis devices on the malaria control program in
Breedge
Quinn1, dr.
Markus
Laubscher2, dr.
Marjan
Hummel1, Prof. Maarten IJzerman1
1:
2:
Philips Research,
This
study focuses on the economic impact of a new malaria diagnostic device on the
Malaria control processes in Brazil.
Malaria
is one of the most common infectious diseases and is an enormous public health
problem. Each year, there are approximately 515 million cases of malaria. Of
these cases, between one and three million people are killed, of whom the
majority are young children in Sub-Saharan Africa. Brazil is one of the malaria-endemic countries with a good healthcare
infrastructure and data availability and has been chosen as the setting of
this study. The ‘golden standard” of malaria diagnosis is currently
microscopy based parasite detection. Recently, rapid diagnostic tests have
been widely introduced to the market. These tests are meant to be used in
those areas where microscopic diagnosis is unavailable. As both technologies
remain to have major disadvantages in the environmental or infrastructural
settings of malaria risk countries, there is a large demand for quick,
reliable and easy to handle diagnostic methods. In addition the advancing
resistance to cheap anti-malarial drugs like Chloroquine demand accurate and
fast response to epidemic situations, in which the role of diagnosis becomes
more and more important. The objective of this research is to study the
cost-effectiveness of new diagnostic devices. Process mapping and Markov
modeling are used to gain insight in the expected cost reduction of
overtreatment and improvement of health benefits for the patient. The basic
markov model consists of two markov cycle trees comparing the costs, including
diagnostic as well as treatment costs, and effectiveness as measured by the
amount of deaths avoided regarding two different diagnostic devices. This
basic model is adjusted for each pairwise comparison of technologies.
Sensitivity analysis is used to analyze the added advantage of reducing the
time to diagnosis and additional functionalities of the devices.
Key
words: Malaria, Brazil, Markov Model, Pairwise Comparison, Drugs
Session III-4: Societal Complexity and
Healthcare
The
Complexity of the Communication between a General Practitioner and a Patient
Dr.
Cor van Dijkum 1, Drs. Niek Lam, Dr. William Verheul 2, Prof. dr.
Jozien
Bensing 1
1:
Utrecht University The Netherlands
2:
Netherlands Institute for Health Services
Research
The
After
the Second World War democratization, information technology and globalization
changed healthcare. Democratization made that those clients from an object of
treatment by professionals became active participants in healthcare.
Globalization brought the free market place closer to choices clients made for
services. Information technology accelerated the way knowledge was accumulated
and communicated by medical sciences, medical practitioners and clients.
Healthcare became a domain in which different actors work together, society is
more and more involved, knowledge of different scientific disciplines is used
and new information technology speeds up the exchange of information. That had
as a consequence that the field became complex and difficult to handle.
However with E-health it is articulated that the use of information technology
on the other hand can improve the handling of the complexity of healthcare.
One
of the complexities that entered healthcare was that the communication between
a professional and a patient is far more complicated than was thought in the
medical profession. However, the social aspect of the communication, not well
included in the medical education and sometimes viewed as an obstacle, is
nowadays accepted as an element that can facilitate the medical diagnosis.
Research done in the GP practice (Bensing 2003) shows how it works. From video
observations and simulation studies it became clear that the process to come
to an adequate diagnosis
depends on the communication skills, both on the GP as well on the patient.
Moreover when looking at an ongoing clinical communication process it is
evident that different elements do not emerge as a simple function of the
participants. Instead the emerging pattern is constantly influenced by the
preceding communication. It is a matter of feedback between the two actors of
the process, and the interaction of psychic components in the actors
themselves that also can be described as (inner) feedback. Simple linear
feedback models however fail to capture that complexity of patient-provider
communication. Complex non linear models are needed to model patient-GP
interaction. It is nowadays discussed in the medical sciences (Suchman 2006)
that such models show that the communication becomes chaotic and lead to
surprises the GP only can anticipate as a surfer on waves.
In
earlier simulation studies of the authors the non chaotic dynamics of a model
of the communication between the GP and patient, including 2 external feedback
loops and 3 internal feedback loops,
is
reproduced with the aid of simulation software. The results of the simulation
compared with quantitative and qualitative representations of video
observations showed to be correct at face-value (Dijkum et al 2008).
In this paper the non linear chaotic dynamics of such models is further
investigated by using Matlab to simulate the chaotic phases of the model,
extending studies of mathematical models of 2 coupled processes (Savi 2007) to
2x3 coupled processes.
With
this simulation study the exact character of the communication between the GP
and patient can be better understood and used as a pattern recognition
technique to facilitate the communication.
References
Bensing
J. et al, (2003).
Communication patterns of primary care physicians in the
Dijkum C. van, Lam N., Verheul W., Bensing J. (2008).
Non
Linear Models for the Feedback between GP and Patients. In: R.Trappl (ed.).
Cybernetics and Systems 2008.Vienna: Austrian Society for Cybernetic Studies,
Savi, M. (2007). Effects of randomness on chaos and order of coupled logistic maps. Physics Letters A, 364, 389–395.
Suchman, A. (2006). A new Theoretical foundation for relationship -centered care. Journal of General International Medicine 2006: 21:S40-44.
Key words: Simulation, Healthcare, General Practitionar, Patient,
Non
linear Chaotic Dynamics, Matlab
Session IV:
Societal Complexity and Sustainable
Development B
Stream:
Methodology of Societal Complexity
Chair session: Prof. dr. Ludmilla Koshlai
Glushkov Institute of Cybernetics
Department of Mathematical Cybernetics
e-mail: koshlai@ukr.net
Session IV-1: Societal Complexity and Sustainable Development B
Manmade
project: diagnosing vulnerability, emergent phenomena, and volatility in
manmade networks
F. Strozzi1, E. Gutiérrez2 and
D.K. Arrowsmith3
1Carlo
Cattaneo University, Castellanza, Italy
2European
Commission, Joint Research Centre, Italy
3University
of London, School of Mathematical Sciences, UK
Dr. Fernanda Strozzi
Istituto Metodi Quantitativi,
LIUC-Universit` Cattaneo
Corso Matteotti, 22,
21053 Castellanza (VA), Italy
Tel:+39.0331.572225 e-mail: fstrozzi@liuc.it
MANMADE
is an EU funded project (1.1.2007-31.12.2009). The scope of the project covers
the mathematical methods required to understand the dynamics of the network of
networks that comprise Europe’s critical infrastructure; concentrating
primarily on energy supply, emergency response systems and subsidiary key
infrastructures (such as transport) that are either directly dependent on them,
or are critically relied on in times of crisis. To gain insight into the key
qualitative dynamical features exhibited by such interdependent networks, the
non-linear phenomena responsible for generic network behaviour such as:
vulnerability, resilience, emergent phenomena, instabilities and collapse:
both structural (catastrophic failure of network components), and functional (electricity
grid blackouts, supply chain), volatility and memory (spot electricity pricing),
feedback (influence on congestion in networks) are being identified. Different
methods are being used to study this properties, for example new methods based
on the spectral representation of the weighted
connectivity matrices
to
measure the vulnerability of agglomerate networks systems to widespread
propagation of failures; RQA (Recurrence Quantification Analysis) techniques
to measure correlation between volatilities of different time series; Hurst
exponent and long range correlation (persistence and antipersistence);
Interdependence
Modelling to rank risk in the interconnected networks in order to identify
vulnerability and to establish priorities for the counter measures be taken. A
general overview of the project as well as some specific results will be
presented.
Key
words:
Manmade
Networks, Energy, Emergency, Transport, Recurrence Quantification Analysis
Session IV-2:Societal Complexity and Sustainable Development B
Triple loop learning - a
complementarist systems approach to management
Prof.
Dr. Slavia petrovic
Faculty
of Economics, University of Kragujevac
In
contemporary circumstances, people have to manage increasing diversity of
issues by using increasing diversity of theories, methodologies, methods. The
key issue refers to a way of choice making between theories, methodologies,
methods. Diversity Management (DM), as a complementarist metatheory, tries to
provide a base of guidelines for choice making. DM is built into a
complementarist methodological idea of Triple Loop Learning (TLL). TLL is
focused on managing three issues (about design–how, debate–what, power and
legitimacy–why) together in order to enable a responsible action.
Key
words: Complex Societal Problems, Critical Decision Making, Problem
Structuring Methods
Session IV-3: Societal Complexity and Sustainable Development
B
New mathematical models of social systems and their
applications
Poveshenko G., Prof. dr. A. Makarenko & E. Samorodov
Institute
for Applied System Analysis at
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.
Key words: Society models, Opinion formation, Multivaluedness, Dynamical systems, GIS
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