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Rianne Gouman, Masja Kempen, & Niek Wijngaards. (2010). Actor-agent team experimentation in the context of incident management. In C. Zobel B. T. S. French (Ed.), ISCRAM 2010 – 7th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management: Defining Crisis Management 3.0, Proceedings. Seattle, WA: Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, ISCRAM.
Abstract: The collaboration between humans (actors) and artificial entities (agents) can be a potential performance boost. Agents, as complementary artificial intelligent entities, can alleviate actors from certain activities, while enlarging the collective effectiveness. This paper describes our approach for experimentation with actors, agents and their interaction. This approach is based on a principled combination of existing empirical research methods and is illustrated by a small experiment which assesses the performance of a specific actor-agent team in comparison with an actor-only team in an incident management context. The REsearch and Simulation toolKit (RESK) is instrumental for controlled and repeatable experimentation. The indicative findings show that the approach is viable and forms a basis for further data collection and comparative experiments. The approach supports applied actor-agent research to show its (dis)advantages as compared to actor-only solutions.
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Rianne Gouman, Masja Kempen, Philip De Vree, Toon Capello, Eddy Van Der Heijden, & Niek Wijngaards. (2007). The borsele files: The challenge of acquiring usable data under chaotic circumstances. In K. Nieuwenhuis P. B. B. Van de Walle (Ed.), Intelligent Human Computer Systems for Crisis Response and Management, ISCRAM 2007 Academic Proceedings Papers (pp. 93–103). Delft: Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, ISCRAM.
Abstract: Conducting empirical research involves a balancing act between scientific rigor and real-life pragmatics. DECIS Lab researches systems-of-systems, consisting of humans and artificial systems involved in collaborative decision making under chaotic circumstances. An important objective is the usefulness of our results to our major application domain: crisis management. DECIS Lab was involved to set up a crisis management exercise experiment and according measurements regarding an improvement in internal communication at Gemeente (Municipality) Borsele. In this paper the empirical research regarding this experiment, the methodology and its results are briefly outlined. Our main lessons learned concern the interrelationship between scenario, experiment and measurements; the problem of acquiring usable data; and the challenges of conducting grounded research.
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Schönefeld, M., Schütte, P. M., Schulte, Y., & Fiedrich, F. (2023). Critical infrastructure and crisis affected actor? Investigating the double role of municipal administrations. In Jaziar Radianti, Ioannis Dokas, Nicolas Lalone, & Deepak Khazanchi (Eds.), Proceedings of the 20th International ISCRAM Conference (pp. 88–95). Omaha, USA: University of Nebraska at Omaha.
Abstract: This WiPe article presents first insights from two German research projects (one ongoing, one completed) on the double role of municipal administrations in crisis management. The ongoing project examines the municipal crisis management during COVID-19, the completed one focused on the 2015/2016 refugee situation in Germany. While crisis management has previously rather been associated with “blue-light organizations”, these two circumstances rather called for a predominantly administrative crisis management. While adapting to this new role, administrations had to maintain key public services: They had to perform as crisis managers while maintaining their function as a critical infrastructure despite being affected themselves for several reasons. Since 2015, public administration in Germany has found itself in almost constant crisis management mode, giving opportunity to learn and to adjust self-perception. Based on empirical analyses of interview data we aim to discuss the following questions: How did the two roles influence each other in the situations mentioned? Has anything changed between these situations?
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