Staff-resources Analytics
do estimation, planning, capacity utilization, allocation and distribution of ‘5M’ resources.
Man (human capital management [scientists, business analysts, system analysts, project managers, engineers]: talent acquisition, talent retention, training, reward and recognition;
Machine (tools, computer hardware, software, internet);
Material (steel, almunium, copper, building masterials – cement, sand, stone, glass, wood);
Method (process innovation for disaster management);
Money (optimal fund allocation, project management, resource allocation, resource distribution).
Mr. Hansie Rabada and Prof. Rina Bell are presenting the need of staff and other various types of resources for the innovation of emerging technologies. Optimal planning and capacity utilization of various types of resources is essential for promoting best practice in disaster management. The expert panel have identified five critical resources for the innovation of emerging technologies for disaster management - man, machine, materials, method and money. The technologies should support process innovation in disaster operation management. It is essential to train and educate the staff on new technogies -how to operate intelligent automated machines, how to install intelligent systems in cost effective ways. The most critical issue is management of financial resources for the innovation and promotion of new technologies. It is rational to use ERP system for optimal planning and capacity utilization of resources; it is an interesting option to explore ERP system for materials management, HR management, financial and cost control for the innovation of emerging technologies.
The technological innovation related to artificial rainfall demands the commitment of creative talent from the domains of earth science, cloud physics, space research organization and ministry of water resource management. It is crucial to analyze dynamics of the technological innovation in terms of sources of innovation and roles of organizations, government and collaborative networks; fair and correct resources
allocation for effective technological evolution and diffusion, dominant design factors and commitment of creative people. Prof. Pal has recommended an intelligent resource sharing mechanism.
Water Sharing Mechanism (WSM)
Agents: Country or state - B and S; /* There may be multiple parties i.e. countries or states involved in water treaties*/
Input:
Output : Collaborative water resource sharing plan or delivery plan (Pd); AI Moves :
- fixed base demand (d), local constraints : up-swing (
) and down-swing limits (
);
- global constraints : maximum total demand (
) and minimum total demand (
);
- penalty (
) for violating local or global constraints and
- swing number constraint (g)
Protocol:
,,,,,g); S bids its optimal delivery plan Po to B.
Set i = 0. Reference plan = Po;
Repeat until the stopping criteria is satisfied:
Set i = i + 1;
B counter bids PiB to S or S counter bids PiS to B;
If both parties agree, output plan Pf = Pi.
B and S jointly settle the compensation plan to be given to the victim or losing party through negotiation based on final plan Pf. in terms of artificial rainfall, cloud seeding, glaciogenic seeding, hygroscopic seeding, rain enhancement, weather modification and water transportation by rail or truck / tanker
Create demand forecast plan.
Identify exceptions for demand forecast of water. Call analytics for exception handling.
Collaborate and resolve demand forecast exception items.
Create the replenishment of order forecast.
Identify exceptions to the order replenishment forecast.
Collaborate and resolve exceptions to the order replenishment forecast.
Create the replenishment order.
Execute delivery plan : allocate and share water.
Verification principle:
verify security intelligence of water allocation and sharing system of the association in terms of
o rationality, fairness, correctness, resiliency, adaptation, transparency, accountability, trust, commitment, reliability and consistency;
o Revelation principle :
verify machine intelligence (Mp) in terms of safety, liveness, concurrency, reachability, deadlock freeness, scalability and accuracy.
Payment function: verify business intelligence (Bp) in terms of cost sharing, incentive and compensation policy.
Dr. Pal is explaining the water sharing mechanism in depth. Three different classes of agents are involved in the resource sharing mechanism: B, S and mediator (M). B and S have well-defined objective function and a set of constraints that represent their preferences over the possible outputs of the mechanism. These agents act rationally to optimize their objective functions and follow the coordination mechanisms correctly. B and S disclose their negotiated data to M. The primary responsibility of M is to ensure fairness and correctness of resource allocation and sharing.
Planning domains (Local and Global): In case of water sharing, it is hard to define a planning domain based on single or multi-objective optimization; it may be based on a valuation model. Here, B and S hold individual planning domains which are derived from their optimization models; B has a budget constraint and S has a capacity constraint. The agents try to minimize the cost of transaction. The local planning domain of B is defined through the constrained optimization problem: max (oB)TxB, s.t. MBxB 
bB where xB, oB, bB and MB are the vector of decision variables, the cost vector, the constraint lower bound vector and the constraint matrix for B, respectively (T: matrix transpose operation). Similarly, the lpd of S is: max (oS)TxS, s.t. MSxS bS. Combining these two one can obtain the joint optimization problem: max oTx, s.t. Mx b where x = xB 
xS, o = oB oS, M=MB MS and b = bB bS for the entire system referred as the global planning domain. Here, x, o, M and b represent the set of decision variables, the cost or objective function vector, the constraint matrix and constraint upper bound vector for the global plan.
Plan: The plan in water sharing is basically a delivery plan of river water. It is a multi-issue negotiation. The bi-party negotiation starts with B bidding a plan P to S. S evaluates P and counter bids an alternative plan P’. B in turn evaluates P’ and counter proposes yet another P” and so on. Finally, if the negotiation ends successfully, B and S accept the commonly accepted agreed plan. The negotiation for a plan consists of successive bidding cycles. In each bidding round, a plan P is bid by either B or S. A successful negotiation process consists of an initial plan followed by a series of compromise plans which culminates in a finally accepted plan.
Plan utility: For any plan P, the utility components of B and S are denoted by uB(P) and uS(P) respectively. These are private to the agents and will not be disclosed to the opponent, i.e. what is revealed in the negotiation process is the proposal for B and the proposal for S without any utility implications. The total utility for a plan P, u(P) = uB(P) + uS(P), is also not revealed to either agent. The concept of utility is also used as plan cost or revenue in artificial intelligence and operations research literature.
Local and global utility effects: Since P0 is optimal for B, uS(P0) < uS(Pi) for all i 
1,
i.e. the utility effect for B(S) for Pi, 
uB(Pi) = uB(P0) - uB(Pi). uS(Pi) = uS(Pi) - uS(P0). Utility effect of B or S is also referred as local utility effect, whereas the global utility effect or total utility effect for Pi is sum of the local utility effects of all the agents. This is because the objective of the coordination process is to increase the total utility, not the individual utility. However, B is entitled to ask for suitable compensation from S to compensate for the reduced utility it has to incur in Pi. Individual utility effects are treated as private information.
Compensation and utility sharing: The losing party will always ask for a compensation amount, which is at least the utility effect. The compensation negotiation has basically two purposes: i) to determine whether the current plan Pi is a feasible one, i.e. whether total utility of Pi has increased over the previous plan Pi-1 (or any other past plan Pj, j<i-1); and ii) to determine how the increased utility to be shared between B and S. This is known as utility sharing.
Utility implication: Utility Implication of B for a plan P denoted u’B(P) is the utility component of P, uB(P) plus the compensation settled um(P). Similarly, the utility implication for S agent u’S(P) is determined. The total of utility implications for B and S is same as the total utility for the plan, u(P). Thus, u’B(P) = uB(P) + um(P); u’S(P) = uS(P) - um(P); u(P) = uB(P) + uS(P) = u’B(P) + u’S(P).
Compensation negotiation and rational behaviors of the agents : Incentive or compensation negotiations are realistic. The agents behave rationally. If the total utility increases, compensation will always be settled such that no agent loses compared to the previous round. In other words, the utility implications for both parties improve. Further, if the compensation negotiation fails, it only means that the total utility for the current bid is less than that for the previous bid. When the negotiation ends successfully in the final plan Pf, the total utility achieved is nothing but u(Pf). The total improvement of utility through the negotiation will be u(Pf) – u(P0) > 0, which is apportioned as um(Pf) for B and u(Pf) – u(P0) – um(Pf) for S. Both B and S are assumed to be rational in exchange of truthful communication and are interested in reducing total plan utility. If none of parties respond then there will be a deadlock. That means that neither B nor S is interested in utility improvement, which violates our assumption. Privacy preservation of individual agents is an important concern for this cooperative game. For this purpose, the utility effects are compared privately. Because the utility effects are kept secret from the respective opponents, the compensation negotiation becomes relevant and the parties feel encouraged to participate in this negotiation. It may be a single or multi-issue negotiation.
Payment: The buying and selling agents disclose the pricing, compensation and delivery plans to the mediator. The mediator checks the authenticity of the identities of the agents and regulatory constraints such as ceiling, consent and sustainability clauses; verifies fairness and correctness of valuation and announces penalty clauses against malafide behavior. The mediator computes payment based on disclosed data; collects payment. S collects payment from B.
Stopping criteria: Stopping the mechanism is possible on various counts such as stable preference matching, total negotiation time deadline, total number of plan bidding rounds and number of successive failed biddings. If any agent withdraws prematurely the mechanism ends unsuccessfully.
Compensation : The agents may settle compensation in various ways such as financial budget allocation or incentive sharing or unconventional ways. Let us consider the case of water sharing between two countries or states. B and S jointly settle the compensation plan to be given to the victim or losing party through negotiation based on final plan in terms of artificial rainfall, cloud seeding, glaciogenic seeding, hygroscopic seeding, rain enhancement, weather modification and water transportation by rail or truck / tanker. The upstream state requires additional amount of water for the growth and development in agriculture, industries, power plants and urban and rural planning. Its demand for water has increased and so the inflow of river water to the downstream state has reduced significantly. On the other side, the downstream state requires more water for the growth and development of urban and rural zones, agriculture and industries. The problem is severe during drought in the summer. So, how is it possible to supply more water to the downstream state – the option is artificial rainfall through cloud seeding. In this case, the compensation may not be directly related to fund allocation or financial support from the upstream to the downstream state. Actually, it is expected to be technological support for artificial rainfall. Can we think of cloud computing in the context of artificial rainfall and cloud seeding – how to control the generation and movement of cloud as per the demand of water of a specific zone?
There are several critical factors associated with fair, correct and rational resource sharing mechanism like river water: good governance, trust, positive mindset, commitment, political will, power play, corporate social responsibilities, cancer of mind, selfish ego, identity crisis and conspiracy for war. Malicious agents always try to sustain the conflict of resource sharing among multiple entities to gain political mileage, incentives from enhanced defense budget and other financial opportunities. War or terrorism may start due to conflict in water sharing. The Supreme Court is expected to act as a Trusted Third Party. A supervisory panel should be set up to decide quantum of water release after studying online data of rainfall and flow in the river. Central Water Commission (CWC) should define a new protocol of online collection of data related to rainfall and flow of water on real-time basis. The meteorological department’s rainfall data and flow into reservoirs of upstream state should match with inspected or verified data. The inflow may be artificially reduced due to unauthorized diversions by a state through various lift irrigation schemes in violation of the final order of the tribunal. It is the duty of the state government to maintain law and order.
The panel have discussed the role of staff-resources for disaster management such as epidemic and pandemic outbreak. The technological innovation on vaccines to fight against new viruses demands the commitment of creative talent from the domains of medical science operations management, managent information systems, healthcare administration and biomedical engineering. It is crucial to analyze the dynamics of technological innovation in terms of sources of innovation and roles of individuals, firms, organizations, government and collaborative networks; various resources required for effective technological evolution and diffusion, dominant design factors, effects of timing and mode of entry. Innovation demands the commitment of creative people. Creativity is the underlying process for technological innovation which promotes new ideas through intellectual abilities, thinking style, knowledge, personality, motivation, commitment and interaction with environment.
The expert panel have identified five critical resources for epidemic and pandemic control : man (e.g. healthcare staff, nurses, doctors, testing staff, government staff of ministry of healthcare and family welfare, scientists and research staffs of innovation lab), machine (e.g. testing kit, thermal scanner, healthcare infrastructure, camps, hospitals) material (e.g. cleaning agents, sanitizers, masks, gloves, medicine, jacket), method (e.g. process innovation in registration, consulting, testing, broadcasting, governance) and money (e.g. budget allocation for healthcare infrastructure development such as hospitals and quarantine camps, disaster relief fund). ‘Man’ analyzes various aspects of human capital management of technological innovations such as talent acquisition and retention strategy, training, payment function, compensation, reward, incentive, health insurance of staff and performance evaluation. ‘Machine’ analyzes the basic aspects of required test kits and medicine of optimal stock. ‘Method’ explores various aspects of process innovation, intelligent mechanism and procedure. Finally, ‘money’ highlights optimal fund allocation for R&D, rational investment analytics, intelligent project analytics and portfolio rationalization.
The technological innovation against astronomical hazards demands the commitment of creative talent from the domains of earth science, space research organization and ministry of science and technology. It is crucial to analyze the dynamics of technological innovation in terms of sources of innovation and roles of individuals, firms, organizations, government and collaborative networks; various resources required for effective technological evolution and diffusion, dominant design factors, effects of timing and mode of entry. Innovation demands the commitment of creative people. Creativity is the underlying process for technological innovation which promotes new ideas through intellectual abilities, thinking style, knowledge, personality, motivation, commitment and interaction with environment. Natural disaster is not a trivial problem; it needs useful and novel support of creative, skilled, experienced and knowledgeable talent. Creative talent can look at the problems in unconventional ways; can generate new ideas and articulate shared vision through their intellectual abilities, knowledge, novel thinking style, personality, motivation, confidence, commitment and group dynamics.