Centre for Human-Centered AI in Operational Planning and Emergencies (HOPE)

in collaboration with 
SMU Lee Kong Chian School of Business and 
SMU College of Integrative Studies

Centre for Human-Centered AI in Operational Planning and Emergencies (HOPE)

in collaboration with 
SMU Lee Kong Chian School of Business and 
SMU College of Integrative Studies

Centre for Human-Centered AI in Operational Planning and Emergencies (HOPE)

in collaboration with 
SMU Lee Kong Chian School of Business and 
SMU College of Integrative Studies

Introducing HOPE

Objectives

  1. To create a new scientific foundation for operational resilience in pandemic settings that empowers decision-makers across agencies to act with foresight, agility, and coordination
     
  2. To advance Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Operations Research (OR) methods for optimizing resource allocation and despatch in crisis settings
     
    • Focus: We focus on methods that are human-centered, and support both peace-time readiness and rapid crisis pivoting, i.e. we develop tools that adapt as a health crisis unfolds, while ensuring continuity of essential services
       
    • Generality: While centered on pandemics, our methods are applicable to other disruptions (natural disasters, security crises) that similarly strain supply logistics, emergency services, and healthcare systems
       

Alignment

Aligns with RIE2030 Grand Challenge in Maximising Healthy and Successful Longevity, and complementarity in focus to existing national initiatives such as PREPARE and PrepVax
 

Vision

Be the leading centre of excellence for adaptive decision methods and tools that help organisations plan, learn, and act with confidence under uncertainty

Mission

Develop new paradigms that strengthens national resilience to future pandemics and other major crisis (e.g. wars, natural disasters)

  • Develop optimized policies, control measures and operational processes that enhance operational resilience
  • Collaborating with existing national programs (PREPARE), we explore ways to evaluate and compare effectiveness of these policies, measures and processes through real field trials
     

Anticipated Benefits and Impacts

Enhanced Pandemic Resilience

  • Optimized stockpiling and distribution to avoid shortages
  • Faster emergency deployments reducing response times during surges

Social and Economic Benefits

  • Economic savings and stability
  • Avert the need for blunt instruments
  • Shorter disruptions and targeted interventions minimize economic loss
  • Fostering societal trust through fair resource allocation

Continuity of Care & Well-Being

  • Safeguarding routine care to prevent collateral harm
  • Improved health outcomes
  • Protecting healthcare workers to reduce burnout

Stakeholder Outcomes

  • Ministry of Health (MOH): faster ramp-up of capacity, and broader reach of supplies, ultimately improving health outcomes (e.g. fewer critical drug shortages). Crisis Strategy & Ops Group uses HOPE’s platform to plan and exercise coordinated responses
     
  • Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA): first responders can achieve significantly improved incident response times even under movement restrictions; enhances public safety and order during a pandemic
     
  • Healthcare providers (hospitals): improve hospitals’ State of Readiness metrics – e.g. maintaining ICU reserve capacity, reducing average appointment delays in surge periods. This translates to better patient outcomes and more resilient hospital operations
     
  • Broader legacy: models can be adopted by other cities globally, amplifying impact and strengthening Singapore’s reputation as a leader in pandemic resilience solutions and contributes to global knowledge on managing future pandemics or large-scale disruptions

Academic Impact

  • Advances in Human-Centered AI×OR Methodologies: HOPE pushes the frontier of integrating Artificial Intelligence (e.g., multi-agent RL, generative models, privacy-preserving learning) with Operations Research (e.g., stochastic / robust optimization, scheduling under uncertainty) to address real-world, high-stakes problems in crisis management.
     
  • Benchmarks and Open Toolkits: Through the development of realistic simulation environments, digital twins, and benchmark datasets grounded in urban public health and logistics, HOPE will contribute open, reproducible testbeds that the broader research community can build upon.
     
  • Cross-Disciplinary Scholarship and Capacity Building: By involving experts across AI, OR, public health, behavioral science, and policy, the proposal fosters a new generation of interdisciplinary scholars and outputs that span journals, conferences, and educational resources in multiple fields.