Research

Overview: Keith Hipel is Officer of the Order of Canada, University Professor of Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo, Past President of the Academy of Science within the Royal Society of Canada, Senior Fellow of the Centre for International Governance Innovation, Fellow of the Balsillie School of International Affairs, and Coordinator of the Conflict Analysis Group at Waterloo. He is globally renowned for his unique interdisciplinary research from a Systems Engineering perspective on the development of conflict resolution, multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA), time series analysis and other decision-making methodologies for addressing challenging system of systems engineering problems lying at the confluence of society, technology and the environment, with applications in water resources management, hydrology, environmental engineering, energy, and sustainable development. His recent breakthroughs in the inverse engineering of decision systems has opened fertile opportunities for benefiting society via seminal contributions in artificial intelligence (AI). Hipel has received numerous accolades for his highly original and useful research.

 

Conflict Resolution: Keith Hipel and his research team are the originators of the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution (GMCR) which constitutes the most comprehensive and flexible formal approach available for systematically investigating real world conflict. The solid mathematical design of GMCR for representing and understanding disputes permits one to model interactive decision making realistically, forecast compromise solutions, and furnish valuable strategic insights. The GMCR methodology includes a novel theoretical structure for modelling the key characteristics of conflict; innovative preference elicitation methods for capturing stakeholders’ value systems; operational techniques for handling preference uncertainty (unknown, fuzzy and grey) and strength of preference; stability concepts for analyzing different kinds of human behaviour under conflict; policy analysis; agent-based modelling using a GMCR perspective; formal consideration of the influence of psychological factors such as attitudes, emotions and misunderstandings (hypergames); coalition analysis for reaching cooperative win/win resolutions; extensive implementation algorithms some of which are based on a new matrix approach for equivalently defining GMCR; hierarchical conflicts; and a decision support system called GMCR II for permitting practical applications in diverse fields (used by 95 user groups in 28 countries). To introduce learning and creativity into conflict resolution, an inverse engineering approach has been recently designed for calculating the preference changes needed by decision makers to reach an attractive outcome, such as a win/win resolution in which a company changes its attitude towards environmental concerns and introduces new technologies to properly treat its wastes. Because a computer can be programmed to determine how people should think to achieve a desirable resolution, inverse GMCR constitutes a bold new area of AI, which should be useful in third party intervention. In what is called the behavioral engine problem, a landmark paper was recently published to calculate the kinds of behavior needed by decision makers to cause specified outcomes given the preferences of the decision makers. A 1993 Wiley (New York) book entitled Interactive Decision Making: The Graph Model for Conflict Resolution that Hipel wrote with L. Fang and D.M. Kilgour, received excellent reviews. The leading-edge book Conflict Resolution Using the Graph Model: Strategic Interactions in Competition and Cooperation (with H. Xu, Kilgour and Fang) was released by Springer (Cham, Switzerland) in May, 2018.

 

Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA): In MCDA, a set of alternative solutions for solving a given problem is evaluated and compared according to a range of criteria such as costs, benefits, environmental effects, and social impacts. Hipel and his co-workers have designed formal methods for taking interdependence among alternatives into account when a final resolution may consist of a combination of alternatives, such as a regional government faced with selecting a mixture of groundwater, lake water and conservation alternatives for satisfying future water demands. They have developed different kinds of classification techniques to handle the elimination of inferior solutions, sorting of alternatives into groups ranked according to preference, and placing alternatives into nominal categories. As well, they have proposed special MCDA methods for use in group decision making and negotiation. To handle uncertainty, they have contributed to both fuzzy and grey MCDA.  Their MCDA methods have been applied to societal decision problems in water supply planning, varying water levels in the Great Lakes, electrical generation, third world infrastructure renewal, inventory management, business, and agricultural sustainability.

 

Time Series Modelling: The classic book on Time Series Modelling of Water Resources and Environmental Systems (Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1994) that Hipel wrote with A.I. McLeod brings together contributions in stochastic hydrology, statistical water quality modelling and statistics, to create a unified and comprehensive approach to environmetrics – the development and application of statistics in the environmental sciences. They also produced an associated decision support system called the MH Time Series Package. A great strength of Hipel’s research in environmetrics is the integrative employment of exploratory data analysis tools, intervention models (special types of transfer-function noise models), regression analysis and nonparametric trend tests for detecting, modelling, and estimating the magnitudes of trends in environmental time series. This type of environmental impact assessment is essential for many important societal activities related to sustainable development including the determination of the effects of land use changes upon the environment, and the effectiveness of pollution abatement policies. Other research in environmetrics to which Hipel made significant contributions includes solving a famous hydrological problem called the Hurst Phenomenon, designing algorithms and procedures for use in model construction, developing simulation algorithms for employment with short and long-memory models, and completing extensive split-sample experiments to ascertain which types of models are most suitable for forecasting nonseasonal and seasonal hydrological time series.

 

Other Decision Making Methodologies: Based on the extensive form of a game, Hipel and his team have constructed compliance models for systematically assessing the effectiveness of a range of policies for enforcing and encouraging adherence by firms to environmental laws and regulations. The cost-effectiveness of inducing compliance is assessed in terms of factors such as the private gain for violators, the costs of inspection by agencies and the social value of encouraging sustainable development. Utilizing concepts from economics, ethics, hydrology, and cooperative game theory, a complex optimization approach called the Cooperative Water Allocation Model was developed for equitably allocating fresh water among competing users in a river basin with application to both the Aral Sea and South Saskatchewan River Basins. A journal paper on this topic that Hipel wrote with L. Wang and L. Fang won the 2012 Best Publication Award in Environment and Sustainability  across all journals during a four-year period from INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences). Other systems analysis topics related to decision making under uncertainty to which Hipel has contributed include risk analysis, agency, fuzzy real options, grey, supply chain, construction management, index, and solid waste management systems.

 

System of Systems (SoS) Engineering: Large-scale SoS problems possess great complexity, deep uncertainty, a diversity of agents, conflicting values, interconnections, and emergent behaviour (surprises), as evidenced by the ongoing interdependent problems of climate change, energy shortages, the food crisis, over-population, lack of fresh water, economic instability, widespread pollution and regional wars. Accordingly, Hipel’s foregoing research contributions are employed within an SoS framework when addressing complex interconnected problems using integrative and adaptive governance in a participatory and interdisciplinary fashion. Hipel and his group are developing a more general theory of SoS engineering and related governance implications to tackle the many pressing SoS problems now facing society and the natural environment.

 

Impacts of the Scholarly Research of Keith W. Hipel

Awards and Honours: For valuable contributions to research, mentoring and service, Hipel has received 63 prestigious awards including:

  • Governor General’s recognition of outstanding achievements for Canada (Officer of the Order of Canada (O.C.) from Her Excellency the Right Honourable Julie Payette, Governor General and Commander-in-Chief of Canada);
  • Top international acknowledgement of distinguished contributions to engineering (Foreign Member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) of the United States of America);
  • Canada’s most important prize in engineering research (Killam Prize in Engineering, one per year);
  • Important Japanese science prize (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Eminent Scientist Award for which the previous 6 out of 7 recipients are Nobel Prize Laureates); 
  • Notable Chinese recognition (Jiangsu Friendship Medal, 5 Honorary Professorships);
  • Highest international distinction in systems engineering research (Norbert Wiener Award from the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC) Society); 
  • Top prizes in water resources research (Honorary Diplomate, Water Resources Engineers (Hon.D.WRE) from the American Academy of Water Resources Engineers within the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE); W.R. Boggess Award from the American Water Resources Association (AWRA));
  • Key international hydrology award (Ven Te Chow Award from the Environmental and Water Resources Institute (EWRI), ASCE);
  • Canada’s highest environmental recognition (Miroslaw Romanowski Medal (Royal Society of Canada (RSC)); 
  • Interdisciplinary research awards (Sir John William Dawson Medal (RSC); Icko Iben Award (AWRA)); 
  • Fellow of 8 professional societies (FRSC, FCAE, FIEEE, FINCOSE, FASCE, FAWRA, FEIC, FAAAS)); 
  • Professional engineering recognition (Engineering Medal for Research and Development (Ontario, Canada)); 
  • Honorary doctorate degrees from 3 nations (France, Hungary, Canada); 
  • Teaching awards (Outstanding Engineering Educator Award from IEEE Canada; Distinguished Teacher Award (University of Waterloo); Award of Excellence in Graduate Supervision from Waterloo);
  • Outstanding career awards from 4 organizations (Joseph G. Wohl Outstanding Career Award from the IEEE SMC Society; Honorary Member in the American Water Resources Association (AWRA); World Automation Congress Lifetime Achievement Award; Water 2010 Lifetime Achievement Award).

Other Contributions and Impacts:

  • Highly-cited leading-edge research (5 books, 12 edited books, 342 journal papers and 243 conference articles; high Hirsch Index of 57, i10 Index of 280, and over 15,200 citations); 
  • Mentoring students (37 PhD and 49 Master’s students have graduated; taught over 5,000 students in Canada and 1,000 more overseas); 
  • Curriculum development including the design and teaching of the courses Conflict Resolution and Time Series Modelling for which he co-authored a textbook and decision support system for each course; 
  • Internationalization of university education via the establishment of successful student exchange programs with three Japanese universities and a Chinese university;  
  • Founder and Chair of the Steering Committee of the ongoing International Conferences on Water Resources and Environment Research (ICWRER); ICWRER 2019 will be held in Nanjing, China; 
  • Technology transfer via carrying out advanced consulting with engineering firms, utilities and government agencies; conflict resolution software used by 95 groups in 28 nations; and
  • Co-Chair of the Expert Panel on Energy Use and Climate Change (Council of Canadian Academies) which produced the report Technology and Policy Options for a Low-Emission Energy System in Canada” (2015).
  • Leadership positions: President of the Academy of Science (RSC); Chair of the Board of Governors of Renison University College; Chair of Systems Design Engineering, Senator and Governor at the University of Waterloo.