BASc,
MASc, PhD (Waterloo), PEng, FCAE,
FRSC, FIEEE, FAWRA
Distinguished Teacher's Award, 1996
Voice: +1 (519) 888-4567 ext. 2830
Fax: +1 (519) 746-4791
Office: E2 1307D
Email: kwhipel@uwaterloo.ca
Research Interests
I derive immense personal fulfillment from working with my graduate students and colleagues in order to co-operatively discover creative solutions to challenging realworld problems. If you share a deep passion to develop systems methodologies and techniques for innovatively solving complex interdisciplinary problems that lie at the interface of society, technology and the environment, you may wish to consider becoming a valued member of our exciting research team. It gives me a great deal of satisfaction to be able to inform you that thirty Master’s and fourteen PhD students have successfully completed their degrees under my guidance or co-supervision and each one of them has attained a rewarding career in industry, government or academia.
Overall, my major research interests are the development and application of conflict resolution and time series analysis techniques from a systems design engineering perspective. The main application areas of these decision technologies are water resources management, hydrology, environmental engineering and sustainable development. Descriptions of some research topics as well as representative publications are given below. For information regarding research on multiple participant-multiple objective decision making and a detailed publication list, kindly refer to the web sites for the Conflict Analysis Group and Curriculum Vitae for Keith W. Hipel respectively. Moreover, course descriptions are available for SYDE533 Conflict Analysis, and SYDE631 Time Series Modelling, both of which I have the distinct pleasure of teaching to our students every fall term.
To maintain high quality research that is relevant and at the cutting edge of developments in a given field, my co-workers and I have embraced a global outlook with respect to our research projects. Our books have been published by well known international companies, our papers have appeared in highly respected national and international journals, and our conference papers have been presented at prestigious meetings held in Canada and abroad. Over the years, I have been privileged to become associated with many academic and professional organizations including the Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC) Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the American Water Resources Association (AWRA), the Royal Society of Canada (RSC), and the Canadian Academy of Engineering (CAE). Moreover, I have thoroughly enjoyed my role as an Associate Editor of many international journals including the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, and Group Decision and Negotiation. Additionally, the valuable experience I have gained in carrying out consulting activities for government agencies, engineering firms and utilities in Japan, Brazil, the United States and Canada, has significantly enhanced my research endeavours. Finally, our students have been able to learn through first-hand experience the language and culture of a foreign country via participation in engineering exchange programs between the University of Waterloo and Tottori and Kyoto Universities in Japan, both of which I helped to found as a direct result of ongoing joint research projects with Japanese collegues during the past two decades.
Conflict Resolution:
(with M. De, L. Fang, and D.M. Kilgour)
Conflict resolution is of significance to engineers and other decision makers because of the increasing importance of social and political influences in engineering decision making. For example, when designing a large scale engineering project such as a nuclear power reactor complex, the engineer must ensure that the undertaking is not only physically, environmentally, financially and economically feasible, but also socially and politically viable. Key objectives of conflict resolution are to gain a better comprehension about the strategic aspects of a given dispute and thereby make more informed and fairer decisions. A formal conflict model provides an effective medium for systematically recording and studying the conflict while the results of a stability analysis based on the model furnish predictions of compromise solutions and suggest where cooperation with others may lead to “win/win” outcomes. Current interesting research problems being studied by members of the Conflict Analysis Group include further developing the graph model for conflict resolution, expanding the decision support system GMCRII, collecting a knowledge base of engineering conflict applications, experimenting with techniques for eliciting ordinal preference information, determining the roles of conflict resolution in risk management, and designing procedures for executing coalition analyses. Graduate and senior undergraduate students are most welcome to take SYDE 533, Conflict Analysis, for credit or audit in order to learn about the theory and practice of formal modelling approaches to conflict resolution as well as be exposed to exciting research developments in this important field of study.
Enforcement of Environmental Regulations
and Monitoring:
(with L. Fang and D.M.
Kilgour)
Ensuring continuous compliance to environmental regulations is an important task for agencies charged with maintaining healthy ecosystems over the long term. Unfortunately, environmental agencies with very limited resources are commonly required to monitor discharges from many facilities, to assess apparent violations, and to carry out enforcement actions as appropriate. Moreover, relatively small penalties are the norm for most convictions, so deterrence by the threat of heavy fines is rarely practical. The overall objective of this project is to develop a general methodology for assessing the viability and effectiveness of various approaches to the enforcement of environmental laws and regulations. More specifically, the methodology is based on the game-theoretic models of verification theory, economics, statistical techniques, monitoring and risk management. The effectiveness of enforcement policies is assessed in terms of factors such as the private gain for violations, the costs of inspection, the structure and levels of penalties, the social costs of violations, and the social value of compliance.
Systems Management and Decision Making:
(with L. Fang and D.M.
Kilgour)
For a given large scale engineering project, a range of different decision technologies are usually required for systematically examining problems connected with the design, implementation and operation of the system. One component of this research is to put various types of decision making techniques into proper perspective and to develop connections among methods used in multiple participant-multiple criteria (MPMC), multiple participant-single criterion (MPSC) and single participant-multiple criteria (SPMC) decision making situations. Research is also being carried out in multiple criteria decision making (MCDM), where one wishes to select a preferred set of actions for solving a given problem when these actions are evaluated against both quantitative and qualitative criteria. Methods are currently being devised in MCDM for screening out inferior solutions and taking into account interdependencies among actions. Finally, approaches are being investigated for capturing the uncertainty aspects of decision making and risk analysis. For example, the information-gap model, which describes the difference between what one would like to know about a system and what one actually knows, is being expanded for use in water resources management, MCDM and conflict resolution.
Environmetrics and Time Series Analysis:
(with A.I. McLeod and
K. Ponnambalam)
Environmetrics is the development
and application of statistical and stochastic techniques in the
environmental sciences. Research in environmetrics being
pursued within the realm of time series modelling of water resources
and environmental systems includes modelling seasonal hydrological
time series using ARMA-type models, trend analysis of water quality
data, environmental impact assessment, intervention analysis,
forecasting, simulation, and transfer function-noise modelling.
Moreover, graduate students are invited to participate in the
interdisciplinary course SYDE
631, Time Series Modelling, which covers a wide range of
interesting topics in time series modelling and analysis with
illustrative applications in hydrology, water quality, and other
fields that are of direct interest to the students.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
(with Ben-Haim, Y.). "Decision Making in an Uncertain World: Information-Gap Modelling in Water Resources Management", IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Vol. SMC-29, No. 4, pp. 506-517, 1999.
(with Rajabi, S. and Kilgour, D.M.). "Modelling Action - Interdependence in Multiple Criteria Decision Making", European Journal of Operational Research, Vol. 110, No. 3, pp. 490-508, 1998.
(with Levy, J. and Kilgour, D.M.). "Systems for Sustainable Development: Challenges and Opportunities", Systems Engineering, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 31-43, 1998.
(with Kilgour, D.M., Fang, L. and Peng, X.). "The Decision Support System GMCR in Environmental Conflict Management", Applied Mathematics and Computation, Vol. 83, No's. 2 and 3, pp. 117-152, 1997.
(with Yin, X., and Kilgour, D.M.). "Can a Costly Reporting System Make Environmental Enforcement More Efficient?", Stochastic Hydrology and Hydraulics, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 151-170, 1995.
(with McLeod, A.I.). Time Series Modelling of Water Resources and Environmental Systems, Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1994.
(Editor). Stochastic and Statistical Modelling with Groundwater and Surface Water Applications, Kluwer, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 1994.
(Editor). Extreme Values: Floods and Droughts, Kluwer, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 1994.
(Editor with Fang, L.). Effective Environmental Management for Sustainable Development, Kluwer, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 1994.
(Editor with McLeod, A.I., Panu, U.S. and Singh V.P.). Time Series Analysis in Hydrology and Environmental Engineering, Kluwer, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 1994.
(with Fukuyama, K. and Kilgour, D.M.). "Systematic Policy Development to Ensure Compliance to Environmental Regulations", IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics", Vol. SMC-24, No. 9, pp. 1289-1305, 1994.
(with Meister, D.B.). "Conflict Analysis Methodology for Modelling Coalition in Multilateral Negotiations", Information and Decision Technologies, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 85-103, 1994.
(with Fang, L., and Kilgour, D.M.). "Game Theoretic Models in Engineering Decision Making", invited paper, Journal of Infrastructure Planning and Management, Japan Society of Civil Engineering, No. 470/IV-20, pp. 1-16, July, 1993.
(with Radford, K.J., and Fang, L.). "Multiple Participant-Multiple Criteria Decision Making", IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Vol. SMC-23, No. 4, pp. 1184-1189, 1993.
(with Fang, L. and Kilgour, D.M.) Interactive Decision Making: The Graph Model for Conflict Resolution, Wiley, New York, 1993.