Effective Decision-Making for DoD Humanitarian Infrastructure Projects using Agent-based Modeling

Decision-makers are confronted with increasingly complex problems involving interconnected and sometimes conflicting objectives and, therefore, they have a continued and growing need for relevant, actionable information. A quantitative tool is being developed to assess the impacts of organizational topology, stakeholder relationships, and the status of physical civil infrastructure networks on decision-making for infrastructure project selection. In this paper, a system-of-systems inspired methodology is used to investigate the aspect of stakeholder relationships in the context of decision-making for Department of Defense humanitarian program selection. In this program, civil infrastructure projects outside the United States (e.g., in host nations) are selected and funded. The hierarchical structure of stakeholder relationships exposed by a system-of-system framework is employed to effectively implement agent-based modeling for analysis of alternatives.