Research
My research focuses on studying and applying integrated systems and operations research modeling methodologies to engineering management applications as well as environmental and societal concerns, with a commitment to a value-focused research for addressing important decision and policy-oriented questions underlying the development of innovative and sustainable business practices.
I recognize the urgent need for innovative decision making and problem solving methodologies that ensure effective design and operation of engineering management and organizational solutions.
Thus, I am deeply involved in carrying out research in multiple-objective and multiple-participant decision making to devise tools that can be used by policy and decision makers for crafting strategic programs that address challenging and complex problems. Conceptually, my research contributions can be categorized into two main strands: 1) conflict and negotiation analysis, and 2) systems design analysis.
Conflict and
Negotiation Analysis
I have used interdisciplinary design methodologies for improving strategic decision making by incorporating studies in cognition, perception, and emotion with a formal game-theoretic technique called the graph model for conflict resolution. This methodology employs definitions phrased in terminology from graph theory, set theory, and logic to model and analyze multiple participant-multiple objective decision situations.
Also, perspectives from neuroeconomics have been employed in developing sets of procedures that accounts for the effect of emotion on decision makers’ strategic and behavioural dispositions as well as perception under various models of awareness. My overall research pursuit is to bridge a gap in the field of decision making between normative decision analysis (i.e., game theory) and descriptive psychological and neurosciences studies to decision-making. It will be interesting to investigate the direct role of emotions on perceiving state transitions with the aid of studies from cognitive and affective neurosciences.
Systems Design Analysis
Recently I have become interested in the application of decision and conflict analysis techniques to societal systems as I found that there is an imperative need for holistic and adaptive approaches that deal with the complex nature of these systems. This interest stems from the fact that multiple-participant systems are pervasive in any process of planning, operation, and managements, and there is often a hierarchy of various stakeholders distributed across different and interconnected systems. Moreover, multiple objectives are often present in the form of a hierarchy of objectives, subobjectives, and sub-subobjectives, because of the cross-disciplinary and cross-domain and interoperability of these systems. In many systems, these multiple objectives are conflicting or competing.
A number of approaches from graph theory, belief networks, and Bayesian probabilistic methods could be adapted to generate a probabilistic set of recognized states and directed graph models to xplore in depth the causation mechanisms among DMs’ feelings, action tendencies, and actual behavior in conflict and negotiation, and develop efficient algorithms for incorporating this triplet of affective responses into a graph model system.