CHOPED-Asia Sharing Session

| By Dr. Di Yin |

On the 13^th of September 2018, amidst Typhoon Mangkhut ravaging the shores of Philippines, Hong Kong, and Southern China, the members of CHOPED-Asia rolled up their sleeves and gathered for a sharing session to keep updated about the team’s mission and progress. Based in Singapore and being somehow spared from such natural calamities, the CHOPED-Asia team was formed to contribute to the humanitarian cause by serving as a knowledge and logistics hub of Asia. The team has specifically set out to improve the coordination of humanitarian operations among its various players and stakeholders, having identified this step to be crucial in disaster management.

Pooling together expertise from different schools; namely, business operations, political science, and systems engineering, the CHOPED-Asia team initiated seven key projects that touch on the different phases of disaster management: (1) Preparedness phase, (2) Response phase, and (3) Recovery phase. During the sharing session, respective team members of the 7 key projects shared updates on their latest work, while welcoming feedback and encouragement from the rest of the CHOPED team.

Dr. Alistair Cook of RSIS gave the first presentation and talked about Project 2 on the mapping of humanitarian actors in the Asia-Pacific region, including the military, the private sector, and volunteers. Subsequently, Mr. Christopher Chen, also from RSIS, discussed the progress of Project 3 on knowledge management for humanitarian continuity. He shared findings from various interviews conducted in the ASEAN region on current practices and proposed actions for managing both explicit and tacit knowledge. Mr Chen was followed by Dr. Lim Wee Kiat from the Asian Business Case Centre of NBS, who gave the team an update on Project 4 about blood management. He presented a diagram depicting the entire network of the blood cold chain for a typical metropolis, and shared key issues and challenges in managing supply and demand of blood products.

Mr. Jesus Lemuel Martin, who is currently PhD candidate at NBS, presented on Project 5 which aims to characterize material convergence and propose ways to manage this phenomenon. He motivated the various assumptions in his stochastic control model, and highlighted some interesting findings from his preliminary simulation studies. Dr. Yin Di, who is currently postdoctoral fellow at NBS, gave an update on Project 6 about information disclosure during post-disaster recovery and showed how a regulator or government can better address the phenomenon of the “Bitch Phase”. Another NBS postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Hu Gaoji, followed with his update on Project 7 which focuses on truth-inducing mechanism for fund allocation with costly verification. He shared some of his theoretically novel findings and how they can be used to design implementable mechanisms. Finally, NBS PhD student Juan Senga discussed his work on blood inventory control as part of Project 4. His work introduces novel features such as donor cool-down period and cost-effectiveness trade-off among multiple donor inducing interventions.

After some closing remarks from Prof. Geoffrey Chua, CHOPED-Asia Principal Investigator, the event ended with each team member having a clearer picture of all 7 projects, and everyone carrying a firmer resolve to see their individual projects through. On a lighter note, the CHOPED team also celebrated its collective progress with some mooncakes and tea in line with the Mid-Autumn festival.