Problem Formulation and Solution Mechanisms: A Behavioral Study of Humanitarian Transportation Planning

Abstract

When dealing with urgent, ill‐defined problems, such as rapidly evolving emergency situations, operations managers have little time for problem formulation or solution. While the mechanisms by which humans formulate and solve problems have been described, mechanisms for rapid, concurrent formulating and solving are not well understood. This study investigates these mechanisms through a field study of transportation planning in a humanitarian response setting. The findings show that the problem is solved through greedy search and formulated through sensemaking, in which search enables updates to an evolving problem formulation, and the formulation directs and limits the search process. This study explores the implications of these findings for the development of better problem formulation processes and problem‐solving strategies for urgent and ill‐defined operations management problems.

Qualitative methods for engineering systems: Why we need them and how to use them

“…Each of these papers provides references to exemplars of good qualitative work in the management domain. For examples in systems engineering, we suggest starting with some of the authors’ previous work: on the technology development process in space science and on problem‐solving processes in humanitarian logistics …”

“…Examples of situations where hypotheses, measures, or modeling assumptions are not clear include: before a survey can measure disaster responder performance, it is necessary to understand what aspects of their behavior should be measured . Similarly, before models could simulate human problem‐solving processes, the process had to be studied in detail to determine the appropriate assumptions to make …”

“…The phenomenon may be impossible or impractical to replicate in a laboratory setting or a model, or the details of the empirical context may be too important to the research to abstract away. For example, understanding how an urgent and chaotic disaster response context affects human decision‐making cannot be easily accomplished in a laboratory . Similarly, understanding the influence of organizational context on the trajectory of a technology development project cannot be done outside of that organizational context .…”

“…While drivers and performance measures may be clear for an engineering artifact, they are less clear for the artifact within its organizational system. For example, improving humanitarian aid delivery cannot be accomplished by an operations research model (artifact) alone, because the plans are produced by people who understand the nuances of the context; instead, qualitative research enabled identification of the performance drivers of the entire system—the model and the people who operate it—as a basis for making improvements. Second, qualitative studies are better at positing logical or causal relationships (“in all cases when X occurs, whether Y will follow depends on W”) rather than describing population characteristics (“all entities of type A will exhibit characteristic Z”)…”

“…Neither author sees herself as a methodologist. We are writing this paper as a translation of established literature from other domains, filtered through the lens of our hard‐learned lessons from applying these methods to systems engineering questions . Our hope is that by framing the key issues as clearly as we can, other engineers who hope to join the qualitative path will build on what we have learned so far and bring increased rigor to their pursuits.…”