Abstract: Critical infrastructure systems are interdependent at different levels and are governed by several sectors working together to maintain social, economic, and environmental well-being. Many models focus on a centralized view for the optimal design and operation of these systems, but rarely is there only one decision maker for the infrastructure systems. In the decentralized decision-making paradigm, individual decision makers need to decide how to allocate resources and eventually improve the aggregated infrastructure systems resilience. Existing literature demonstrates the importance of understanding collective behavior for decision models and Operational Research (OR) interventions. There is still a dearth of studies examining how decision makers collaborate to shape OR-supported processes in infrastructure systems. This talk focuses on cooperative game theory, coupled with network optimization, enabling players/decision makers to explore coalitional structures and incentive schemes to coordinate their decisions towards system optimality. This game framework is first formulated and solved for a healthcare system, representing one infrastructure sector. It is then extended for interdependent water and transportation infrastructure systems. The proposed approach is applied to water distribution and road networks in the City of Tampa, Florida. The obtained solutions are compared to centralized solutions in different scenarios to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach for the city-scale infrastructure networks.

Bio: Shima Mohebbi is an assistant professor in the Department of Systems Engineering and Operations Research, and affiliate faculty of Computer Science at George Mason University. Shima is also a core faculty of C-RASC (Center for Resilient and Sustainable Communities) at Mason. Her research interests include game theory, network optimization, simulation (discrete-event, agent-based, system dynamics), and interpretable machine learning. Shima has collaborated across disciplines including civil engineering, computer science, social science, and nursing. She was a visiting scholar in the University of Exeter’s Center for Water Systems in the UK. She received her PhD in Industrial and Systems Engineering, and her second master’s degree in Statistics from the University of Tennessee. Her research is supported by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Transportation. Shima has served as a board director in the Modeling and Simulation Division of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers and is passionate about engineering education and outreach activities. In her spare time, Shima enjoys playing the piano and is an outdoor enthusiast.

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