AI for crisis decisions

Increasingly, our cities are confronted with crises. Fuelled by climate change and a loss of biodiversity, increasing inequalities and fragmentation, challenges range from social unrest and outbursts of violence to heatwaves, torrential rainfall, or epidemics. As crises require rapid interventions that overwhelm human decision-making capacity...

Decisions on life-cycle reliability of flood defence systems

Many countries rely on flood defence systems to prevent economic damage and loss-of-life due to catastrophic floods. Asset managers of flood defence systems need to cope with the consequences of structural degradation, and changing societal and environmental conditions, in order to satisfy performance requirements and optimize societal value of...

Optimizing deep reinforcement learning policies for deteriorating systems considering ordered action structuring and value of information

Inspection and maintenance (I&M) optimization entails many sources of computational complexity, among others, due to high-dimensional decision and state variables in multi-component systems, long planning horizons, stochasticity of objectives and constraints, and inherent uncertainties in measurements and models. This paper studies how the...

Influence-Based Consequence Assessment of Subsea Pipeline Failure under Stochastic Degradation

The complexity of corrosion mechanisms in harsh offshore environments poses safety and integrity challenges to oil and gas operations. Exploring the unstable interactions and complex mechanisms required an advanced probabilistic model. The current study presents the development of a probabilistic approach for a consequence-based assessment of...

Forecasting elections based on the aggregation of election polls

<br/>Elections polls have been known to exist since 1824 [14], to fulfill the objective of what is happening and may happen. In this thesis it is investigated what the performance of election polls is and if the aggregation of polls give a better forecast than the polls themselves. The data is used of Spain during years 2012 until 2017 and The...

Framing and tracing human-centered design teams' method selection: an examination of decision-making strategies

Designers’ choices of methods are well known to shape project outcomes. However, questions remain about why design teams select particular methods and how teams’ decision-making strategies are influenced by project- and process-based factors. In this mixed-methods study, we analyze novice design teams’ decision-making strategies underlying 297...

A formal framework for reasoning about opportunistic propensity in multi-agent systems

Opportunism is an intentional behavior that takes advantage of knowledge asymmetry and results in promoting agents’ own value and demoting others’ value. It is important to eliminate such selfish behavior in multi-agent systems, as it has undesirable results for the participating agents. In order for monitoring and eliminating mechanisms to...

A Bayesian framework for risk perception

We present here a Bayesian framework of risk perception. This framework encompasses plausibility judgments, decision making, and question asking. Plausibility judgments are modeled by way of Bayesian probability theory, decision making is modeled by way of a Bayesian decision theory, and relevancy judgments are modeled by way of a Bayesian...

Bayesian estimation for decision-directed stochastic control

Stochastic processes with a decision-directed control are considered as controlled Markov processes, the state space of which is hybrid; i.e. a product of a discrete set and a Euclidean space. This approach yields a mathematical model for many problems of decision-directed stochastic control. In general, the observations made from the "past" and...

How to reason with uncertain knowledge

In this paper two kinds of uncertainty, general and specific uncertainty, are distinguished. General uncertainty denotes an uncertainty about which objects of a class belong to a relation. Sentences in which it occurs can be view as describing incomplete knowledge. An example of such a sentence is: "Most humans have brown eyes". Specific...

A model of the human decision maker observing a dynamic system

In this report a model of the human observer and decision maker is described. A submodel of the human observer is formulated in linear estimation theoretical terms including the perception of the displayed information of a linear process and the central information processing stage. The subsequent decision process is described in terms of...

Human monitoring and control behaviour models and experiments

This report deals with a theoretical and experimental program concerning human monitoring and and control behaviour. A model for multivariable monitoring (an automatic approach) was tested against experimental data. Apart from monitoring, simultaneously monitoring and manual flight director control was studied to determine the interference...

A theoretical framework to study the effect of cockpit information

This paper deals with a theoretical framework describing human operator's participation in manned vehicle systems. Herewith, the human operator is described in terms commensurate with those used for other system elements, which is desirable because of the complex interaction between human functioning and his task environment (e.g. cockpit i...

Human control and monitoring-models and experiments

This paper deals with the resiilts of a theoretical and experimental program concerning human monitoring behavior. Apart from monitoring an automatic approach combined monitoring and manual flight director control was studied to determine the interference between subtasks. Also simultaneously monitoring and auditory tracking was included. The...