On the utility of experiential cross-training for team decision making under time stress

This study investigated the effectiveness of experiential cross-training in a team context for team decision-making under time stress in a simulated naval surveillance task. It was hypothesized that teams whose members explicitly experience all team positions will perform better under time pressure due to a better shared Team Interaction Model (Cannon-Bowers et al. 1993). In addition, it was posited that experiential cross-training would reduce the negative effect of member reconfiguration that can occur in certain military situations. Three groups of teams participated in this study (cross-trained, reconfigured and control). The experiment involved three team training sessions, followed by three time-stressed exercise sessions. During training, one group of teams was cross-trained (CT) by asking each member to perform an entire session at each of the three team positions. Member reconfiguration (where each member was shifted to another's position) was unexpectedly introduced at the first of the exercise sessions for the CT group and for another group (reconfigured) that had not been cross-trained. A third (control) group was neither cross-trained nor reconfigured. During training, the performance of non-CT teams improved more quickly than that of CT teams. During the exercise, the CT group did not achieve the level of performance of the control teams. The immediate effect of team member reconfiguration was to degrade performance significantly for the non-CT teams, but not for the CT teams. The findings are discussed in terms of the multiple mental models' view of team performance (Cannon-Bowers et al. 1993) and the authors discuss the relative utility of crosstraining when overall training time is fixed.     

On the perception of time: experiential impact

"I don't believe it: another year has flown by-it seems that time is going by at an ever-faster rate." This often-expressed perception of time, actually the speed of time, is both qualitatively and quantitatively explored herein. While the speed of time is clearly invariant (at least on earth and at speeds that are orders of magnitude below the speed of light), there is ample and plausible evidence that serves to contribute to our perception of a faster moving time. More specifically, it seems that both nature and nurture impact or influence our perception of time, in particular, the speed of time. In this paper, we briefly review the cognitive and related literature to understand why the older we get, the more we perceive the speed of time to increase-there is a clinical reason for this nature-related aging phenomenon. We then show that nurture-related or experiential factors can also affect our perceived speed of time. More specifically, time series data that concern factors which impact our daily lives can be used to model or correlate with our perception of time. It is suggested that nurture reinforces and about doubles nature's impact; that is, the older we get, the more we perceive time to be speeding up. Interestingly, when age is controlled, the experiential data suggests, for example, that a 62-year-old in 1997 perceived time to be about 7.69 times as fast as that perceived by a 62-year-old in 1897; this phenomenon is less extreme for younger aged persons. Finally, it should be noted that understanding the way we perceive the speed of time over time is not only an important endeavor in its own right, but it also has a potentially significant impact on our ability to cope, on our work productivity, on our lifestyle, indeed on all aspects of our life.     

Cognitive biases and time stress in team decision making

This experiment investigates the impart of time stress on the decision making performance of command and control teams. Two person teams were trained to execute a set of simple decision procedures. Some of these procedures required subjects to make judgments that were inconsistent with normal heuristic decision processing. The principal hypothesis was that these decision procedures would be vulnerable-to-bias, and would therefore be more vulnerable to the effects of time stress than other decision procedures. The results support this hypothesis. In addition, the results suggest that the subjects adapted inappropriately to time stress. As time stress increased, they began to use a decision processing strategy that was less effective than the strategy they were trained to use     

Testing the effectiveness of icons for supporting distributed team decision making under time pressure

There has been minimal experimentation testing the effectiveness of icons (or interface features in general) on distributed team decision making. To overcome this deficiency, an experiment tested the effectiveness of a "send" icon to remind team members to send information to their teammates, and a "receive" icon to tell them when they had received information, for a simulated, military task. As predicted, the "send" icon was effective in maintaining information flow, particularly when time pressure was high and simulated teammates sent less information, because it reduced memory burden and supported proactive behavior. The "receive" icon was only effective in supporting decision accuracy when time pressure was low. As time pressure increased, participants' with the "receive" icon increasingly used a strategy of making decisions before reading the most important information, completely counter to expectations. These results illustrate the subtle, sometimes surprising way task characteristics (e.g., time pressure) can affect participants' strategies and, thereby, ify the positive effect of displays on performance. The experiment also examined other task characteristics and working memory capacity, and showed how the lens model equation (LME) helped explain all effects on decision accuracy.     

The human factors of project team decision-making for radioactive waste management

Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) is central to the ‘Best Practical Environmental Option’/Best Available Technology (BPEO/BAT) approach used to underpin UK radioactive waste management decisions and optimise remediation project portfolios. Internal and external stakeholder involvement is routine, and a consensus is necessary on many issues, including performance ratings and overall decision logic. This paper describes some of the human factors issues associated with the interactive processes typical of this type of application—particularly ‘scoring’ in workshop environments. The analysis draws on and integrates the author’s practical experience with work in three separate domains, namely: (1) decision analysis, (2) individual behavioural analysis, and (3) group processes. The conceptual framework presented addresses a number of important issues. These include the need for improved objectivity and quality of stakeholder and expert input to projects, improved management of prior assumptions and preconceptions, improved audit trails to the evidence base; a systematic approach to consensus building; and integration of MCDA into the wider project decision-making process. Insight presented by the case study will be applicable across a wide range of MCDA application.     

Team situation awareness measure using semantic utility functions for supporting dynamic decision-making

Team decision-making is a remarkable feature in a complex dynamic decision environment, which can be supported by team situation awareness. In this paper, a team situation awareness measure (TSAM) method using a semantic utility function is proposed. The semantic utility function is used to clarify the semantics of qualitative information expressed in linguistic terms. The individual and team situation awareness are treated as linguistic possibility distributions on the potential decisions in a dynamic decision environment. In the TSAM method, team situation awareness is generated through reasoning and aggregating individual situation awareness based on a multi-level hierarchy mental model of the team. Individual and team mental models are composed of key drivers and significant variables. An illustrative example in telecoms customer churn prediction is given to explain the effectiveness and the main steps of the TSAM method.     

Knowledge-based system for three-way decision-making under uncertainty

Knowledge and Information Systems - Knowledge-based systems developed based on Dempster–Shafer theory and prospect theory enhances decision-making under uncertainty. But at times, the...     

When stress becomes shared: exploring the emergence of team stress

Cognition, Technology & Work - Team stress is an emergent cognition in which members jointly appraise their current task situations. The sharedness of stress appraisals has been elaborately...     

Iterated local search for the team orienteering problem with time windows

A personalised electronic tourist guide assists tourists in planning and enjoying their trip. The planning problem that needs to be solved, in real-time, can be modelled as a team orienteering problem with time windows (TOPTW). In the TOPTW, a set of locations is given, each with a score, a service time and a time window. The goal is to maximise the sum of the collected scores by a fixed number of routes. The routes allow to visit locations at the right time and they are limited in length. The main contribution of this paper is a simple, fast and effective iterated local search meta-heuristic to solve the TOPTW. An insert step is combined with a shake step to escape from local optima. The specific shake step implementation and the fast evaluation of possible improvements, produces a heuristic that performs very well on a large and diverse set of instances. The average gap between the obtained results and the best-known solutions is only 1.8% and the average computation time is decreased with a factor of several hundreds. For 31 instances, new best solutions are computed.     

Team experiential cognitive style and team performance: The moderating impact of workplace setting

With an increasing need in organizations to come up with novel and useful ideas to renew and survive, team creativity has grown in importance to managers and researchers. As the cognitive resources of team members are the core input for team creativity, researchers increasingly look at team cognition in general and team cognitive styles in particular. In this research stream, the environmental context in which team members are embedded has received limited attention. We therefore experimentally test variation in the physical workplace environment and how it influences the relationship between team experiential cognitive styles and team creativity. Manipulating the nature of architectural elements in the room, we distinguish between a physical workplace with (i) experiential cues and (ii) rational cues. We also use a control condition where architectural elements are absent in the workplace environment. We rely on resource‐matching theory to build our hypotheses. Using data of 75 student teams of a Dutch university, we find that the relationship between teams' experiential cognitive style and team creativity was positive in the control condition. This positive relationship became insignificant in the two conditions where experiential or rational cues were introduced. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

On the evaluation of stress intensity factors for a simple crack under parametric loading

Two analytical approaches for the evaluation of stress intensity factors at the tips of a single straight crack in plane isotropic elasticity under symmetric tensile loading along the crack edges including a parameter are considered. The first method leads to an ordinary differential equation for the stress intensity factor (or to a system of such equations) with respect to the loading parameter, whereas the second method leads to closed-form results for the related integral by using Laplace transform techniques. Several elementary transcendental functions, such as the exponential function, were used in the loading distribution for an illustration of the present approaches and related results are presented. The computer algebra system Maple V was also used together with Gröbner bases (for the derivation of the differential equations) and with definite integration (for the derivation of the closed-form formulae).     

Two-level particle swarm optimization for the multi-modal team orienteering problem with time windows

This study presents a new variant of the team orienteering problem with time windows (TOPTW), called the multi-modal team orienteering problem with time windows (MM-TOPTW). The problem is motivated by the development of a tourist trip design application when there are several transportation modes available for tourists to choose during their trip. We develop a mixed integer programming model for MM-TOPTW based on the standard TOPTW model with additional considerations of transportation mode choices, including transportation cost and transportation time. Because MM-TOPTW is NP-hard, we design a two-level particle swarm optimization with multiple social learning terms (2L-GLNPSO) to solve the problem. To demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed model and algorithm, we employ the proposed 2L-GLNPSO to solve 56 MM-TOPTW instances that are generated based on VRPTW benchmark instances. The computational results demonstrate that the proposed 2L-GLNPSO can obtain optimal solutions to small and medium-scale instances. For large-scale instances, 2L-GLNPSO is capable of producing high-quality solutions. Moreover, we test the proposed algorithm on standard TOPTW benchmark instances and obtains competitive results with the state-of-art algorithms.     

一种面向效用值偏好信息的大群体决策方法

针对群体成员偏好信息以效用值形式给出的大群体决策问题.提出了判断群体成员提供信息量多寡程度的熵权方法,去除提供较少信息量的成员,形成群体关于决策方案的效用矩阵.利用聚类方法对大群体成员效用向量进行聚类.根据聚类结果确定成员权重,将该权重与效用矩阵合成获得决策方案排序向量.提出了成员意见反映度指标和差异度指标.对群决策结果进行评价.最后通过一个实例说明该方法的有效性和实用性.     

考虑消费者效用的电商平台信用支付决策研究

考虑由两个生产不同质量产品的制造商和一个电商平台组成的供应链,基于消费者剩余理论,研究电商平台的信用支付服务决策问题。基于消费者选择不同支付方式购买产品的消费者效用,建立电商平台收益模型,进一步分析得到平台的信用支付服务决策。研究表明,当消费者对质量一般产品的接受程度较高、信用支付服务对消费者带来的负效应较大时,推出信用支付可以提高平台收益,增加消费者剩余;当消费者对质量一般产品的接受程度较低、信用支付服务的负效应较小时,推出信用支付服务且设置较长的延迟支付期可提高平台收益,增加消费者剩余,否则将产生较大资金成本,使平台利益受损。电商平台可通过制定合理的信用支付策略提高平台收益。     

基于群决策考虑属性效用一致性的DEA他评交叉效率公共权重排序法

针对一类主从式异构线性网络化多智能体系统,考虑每个智能体的反馈通道和前向通道中存在随机网络诱导时延和数据包丢失问题,采用预测控制方法,提出一种基于观测器的网络化多智能体协同输出跟踪控制方案.在该方案中,主智能体在每一时刻基于自身滞后输出和系统参考信号,计算一组控制预测序列和输出预测序列,前者用以主动补偿主智能体控制回路中的随机网络诱导时延和数据包丢失,后者被发往从智能体;从智能体在每一时刻基于主智能体发送过来的输出预测序列和自身滞后输出,计算一组控制预测序列,用以主动补偿从智能体控制回路中的随机网络诱导时延和数据包丢失;随后推导闭环网络化多智能体控制系统的稳定性,并通过实验验证该方案的有效性和可行性.     

一种部分权重信息下两阶段多属性决策方法

研究了只有部分权重信息(区间数),属性值为实数的多属性决策问题。通过建立单目标线性规划模型求出各方案的局部最优权重向量,通过将各方案的局部最优权重向量与全局最佳属性权重的偏差最小化,建立多目标优化模型,并将其转化成一个单目标优化模型计算出全局最优属性权重向量,从而得到了一个两阶段的多属性决策方法。通过实例说明了该方法的可行性和有效性。     

An artificial bee colony algorithm approach for the team orienteering problem with time windows

This study addresses a highly constrained NP-hard problem called the team orienteering problem with time windows (TOPTW), which belongs to a well-known class of vehicle routing problems. This study proposes a relatively new technique called artificial bee colony (ABC) approach to solve the TOPTW. Moreover, considering that the number of studies for discrete optimization with an ABC algorithm is comparatively low, this study presents a new use of the ABC algorithm for a difficult discrete optimization problem. Additionally, this study introduces a new food source acceptance criterion and a new scout bee search behavior, both of which significantly contribute to the solution quality. The results show that the proposed method is effective, efficient, and comparable to other approaches.     

Heuristics for the time dependent team orienteering problem: Application to tourist route planning

The Time Dependent Team Orienteering Problem with Time Windows (TDTOPTW) can be used to model several real life problems. Among them, the route planning problem for tourists interested in visiting multiple points of interest (POIs) using public transportation. The main objective of this problem is to select POIs that match tourist preferences, taking into account a multitude of parameters and constraints while respecting the time available for sightseeing in a daily basis and integrating public transportation to travel between POIs (Tourist Trip Design Problem, TTDP). TDTOPTW is NP-hard while almost the whole body of the related literature addresses the non-time dependent version of the problem. The only TDTOPTW heuristic proposed so far is based on the assumption of periodic transit service schedules. Herein, we propose efficient cluster-based heuristics for the TDTOPTW which yield high quality solutions, take into account time dependency in calculating travel times between POIs and make no assumption on periodic service schedules. The validation scenario for our prototyped algorithms involved the transit network and real POI datasets compiled from the metropolitan area of Athens (Greece). Our TTDP algorithms handle arbitrary (i.e. determined at query time) rather than fixed start/end locations for derived tourist itineraries.