Dr Brian Drabble
Lecturer in Operations Managementq
Faculty of Management of Law
Bradford University
United Kingdom
Biography
Brian joined the Operations and Information Management Group in July 2016 as a Lecturer in Operations Management. Previously, he was Chief Technology Officer of two research and development companies in the US focusing on intelligent planning and scheduling. Prior to his involvement in the commercial sector he was a Senior Research Scientist and Director at the Computational Intelligence Research Laboratory at the University of Oregon and a Senior Research Scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory at the University of Edinburgh.
Research Interest
Brian's research interests are focused on the development of representations and reasoning techniques for automated planning and scheduling tools for operations management. These approaches focus on the development and analysis of dependency based networks that provide a "system of systems" approach to the modelling of people, organizations, locations, resources, concepts, etc involved in businesses and business processes. The analysis of such networks provides insights and guidance into ways in which they could be improved to increase network efficient, reduce over dependence on certain key nodes or to increase overall network robustness. Options and changes to bring about changes in network behavior are identified and developed using a range of intelligent planning tools. These provide a spectrum of support to the operation manager from pure manual tools through mixed initiative tools to one that can generate solutions with human intervention or guidance. Brian's research interests also focus on the development of ontologies to support business collaboration and cooperation. The development of these ontologies supports the extraction, mapping and fusion of information from multiple disparate sources (databases, webpages, documents, etc.) into coherent and systematic model of an enterprise or business. The fused information and any subsequent updates are used to drive the dependency analysis and planning tools described previously.
Publications
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Drabble, B. (2014). Modeling C2 Networks as Dependencies: Understanding What the Real Issues Are. In T. Grant, R. Janssen, & H. Monsuur (Eds.) Network Topology in Command and Control: Organization, Operation, and Evolution (pp. 125-151). Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference. doi:10.4018/978-1-4666-6058-8.ch006
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Tate, A., Drabble, B. and Kirby, R. O-Plan2: An Open Architecture for Command, Planning and Control, in Intelligent Scheduling (Zweben. M. and Fox. M.S.), 1994. Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann, Palo Alto, CA, USA.
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Drabble, B., (2013), Dependency based collaborative design, Proceedings of the Collaborative Technologies and Systems Conference (CTS 2013), (pp. 266-272). May 21-25, 2013, The Commons Hotel, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA: IEEE.
