What can we do to better coordinate the efforts of those who risk their lives proving aid following a disaster? How can aid agencies organize themselves to promote higher levels of coordination? The tragic events of the Southeast Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina have brought renewed interest in solving these difficult problems.

COHORT is an academic research program that seeks to understand the issues that humanitarian organizations face in their coordination efforts, particularly in the domain of information and communication technologies.

Our research is undertaken by an interdisciplinary team including researchers from sociology, institutional economics, computer science and industrial engineering. In our research we seek to understand the ways in organizational designs, including factors such as structure, membership criteria and funding, among others, influence the ability of humanitarian organizations to make decisions that will enable them work together during disaster relief as well as development. Further, we seek to assess the extent to which improved decision making has effects on humanitarian relief supply chains, the means by which aid is delivered to disaster survivors.

To date, our research activities include performing case studies of organizations that help facilitate humanitarian relief and development coordination, including Humaninet, NetHope, and UN OCHA. With the data from these case studies we model decision making in these organizations using an intelligent agent architecture known as R-CAST. Using R-CAST we will compare outcomes from the various case studies and manipulate the organization designs to better understand which factors can be changed to improve decision making. The outcomes from our R-CAST experiments will be used to improve humanitarian relief supply chain models, which will help us identify the extent to which coordination improves performance and if so how.

The latest findings from our research are available on this website or through academic journals and presentations made at practitioner and academic conferences. Also, for information about the organizations that support our research see the links on this page or read the press release announcing our award from the U.S. National Science Foundation.