Expert judgement elicitation for risk assessments of critical infrastructures

Governmental bodies and companies are confronted with the problem of achieving rational consensus in the face of substantial uncertainties. The subject area of this special issue (risk and vulnerability assessments and management of critical infrastructures) might be a good example as are risk management of chemical installations and accident consequence management for nuclear power plants. Decisions with regard to infrastructures functioning and possible malfunctioning must be taken on the basis of predictions of technical and organizational system behaviour. These predictions use mathematical models containing scores of uncertain parameters. Decision makers want to take, and want to be perceived to take, these decisions in a rational manner. The question is, how can this be accomplished in the face of large uncertainties? One available source is experts in the many fields of interest within infrastructures. This paper describes the use of structured expert judgement in a formal manner. The paper refers to the Procedures Guide published by the European Union as EUR 18820. This Procedures Guide addresses two methods for using expert judgements developed at Delft University of Technology. The paired comparisons method is particularly suitable to identify the relative importance of attributes in the risk management arena, while the Classical Model, apt to arrive at subjective probability assessments, is particularly suitable to derive uncertainty distributions over model parameters. Examples will be referred to for further illustration of applications relevant in the field of risk assessment and risk management.     

A Collaborative Multi‐criteria Decision Making Technique for Risk Factor Prioritization

Organizations are a collection of individuals, and often a disastrous organizational accident involves contributions from several technical/environmental factors and actors throughout the system over time. This paper illustrates the efficiency of a new collaborative decision making technique that could assist a group of executive decision makers in identifying, analyzing, evaluating and prioritizing significant organizational system risks. The results from the collaborative technique when applied to real world risk intensive situations, such as aviation safety risk management, are compared with those obtained by using existing notable techniques. For the case examples shown, the number of expert judgments is reduced by up to 80%. Advantages and limitations of the proposed modeling approach for collaborative decision making are discussed.     

Coping with risk: analysis on the importance of integrating social perceptions on flood risk into management mechanisms – the case of the municipality of Águeda,Portugal

The paper reflects on how populations prone to flood risk perceive such hazards and the way this perception has or has not been incorporated into the measures and mechanisms of flood risk management. The frequent occurrence of flooding, as well as the population's vulnerability and exposure to this risk, shows that the municipality of Águeda is a paradigmatic case for analysis of these issues. Similar to the rest of the country, the municipality of Águeda has been neglecting the multidimensional nature of flood risk. The data collected present some disparity between the proposals and technical perspectives regarding the management and mitigation of flood risk and the perception of local populations. In addition, neither knowledge of social perception of flood risk nor of the local communities is being integrated in a substantial and pro‐active way, whether in the processes of policy‐making or in the implementation of these policies. Empirical evidence equally shows that there is a clear tendency towards acceptance and coping with flood risk by the population in the municipality of Águeda. This seems to be connected to the local populations' recognition that though it is impossible to eliminate risk, there are at the same time advantages to occupying the floodplains.     

建立社会稳定风险评估机制探析

随着我国改革开放的进一步深入,经济高速发展,社会进入转型发展的关键时期,保持社会和谐稳定成为实现经济社会全面协调可持续发展的重要保障和必然要求,因此建立社会稳定风险评估机制是促进社会主义和谐社会建设的重要制度和手段。本文首先明确了社会稳定风险内涵,然后阐述了社会稳定风险评估作为独立风险评估制度存在的重要意义,对社会稳定风险评估中的一些重要问题进行了论证,最后提出了进行社会稳定风险评估的一般模型,以期对处于探索阶段的社会稳定风险评估实践提供一定的借鉴和指导。     

What role for social scientists in risk expertise?

When it comes to risks – health and environmental risks, like those linked to the use of nanotechnologies, pesticides, etc. – three main groups of actors are easily identified, brought together through boundary organisations such as environmental and sanitary risk agencies: the natural and technical scientists, who provide their expertise to assess risks (especially toxicologists, epidemiologists and microbiologists); the policy makers, who take decisions regarding risk management and risk regulation; the lay public, who are more and more involved in participatory frameworks. Sometimes three other groups of actors are added: the ‘economists’ who can for instance conduct cost–benefit assessments or multi-criteria analyses (especially ecological economists, public economists, political economists and social economists); the ‘philosophers’/‘ethicists’ who can use ethics to highlight moral choices and responsibilities in face of risks; and the ‘jurists’/‘legal experts’ who can justify authorisation or interdiction according to law. Inversely, there is a group of actors which is not clearly identified, that of social scientists, even though a considerable quantity of social science knowledge on risk has been produced. Why is there such a discrepancy? This article, based on a critical review of the literature, aims to make sense of the fuzziness surrounding the involvement of social scientists when it comes to risk expertise. The article shows that one reason for this puzzling situation is to be found in the gap between what social scientists often want to do when they are called in as risk experts and what natural scientists and public policy makers actually expect from them.     

Experiences with EXGAME: an expert system for playing a competitive business game

This paper looks at expert systems in management, by using a business game as an experimental vehicle. An expert system called EXGAME was developed to play a business game, which is normally played by students, with minimal human intervention. This paper concentrates on the effectiveness of EXGAME as compared with human players for tasks at different levels. EXGAME was able to replace human players in decision making at the operational level, and indeed outperform them. However, it proved to be impractical to replace human input at the strategic level. The paper also sheds some light on the problems of trying to build an expert system when there is no real expert. A combination of a modular knowledge-base structure and a process of ‘learning by experimentation’ was effective in this case; it is suggested that this may be an appropriate development strategy in other similar situations. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

审计师对信息风险区别对待了吗?——基于“调增式变脸”与审计意见关系的证据

借鉴Francis等(2005)将信息风险区分为基本面、信号传递、机会主义行为与纯噪音四方面风险的思路,本文研究审计师是否对信息风险的不同构成进行了区别对待。结合相关理论,本文选择了管理层预测报喜的公司为样本,以报喜"无变脸"代表信号传递风险或无风险,以"调增式变脸"代表基本面与机会主义披露策略的混合风险,实证发现"调增式变脸"更容易得到非标意见。进一步地选择"调增式变脸"的公司为分样本,以"扭亏型变脸"代表基本面风险,以"其他调增式变脸"代表机会主义披露策略风险,实证发现"扭亏型变脸"更容易得到非标意见。研究结果表明,审计师对信息风险的不同构成进行了区别对待,且最关注基本面风险。     

Towards a new approach for the identification of atypical accident scenarios

Proper hazard identification (HAZID) in safety reports has become progressively more difficult to achieve. Several major accidents in Europe in recent years, such as Buncefield and Toulouse, were not even considered by their site ‘Seveso-II’ Safety Case. One of the reasons is that available HAZID methodologies take no notice of apparently least likely events. Nonidentified scenarios thus constitute a latent risk, whose management is extremely complex and open ended. For this reason, the EC project iNTeg-Risk, in one of its tasks, aimed to investigate the issue of atypical scenarios and explain how they could have been identified. This study wants to describe the approach used and its immediate results, paving the way towards a new method for the identification of atypical accident scenarios. An in-depth accident analysis of some of these accidents was performed, in order to outline general features of plants in which they occurred, their causes, consequences, and lessons learned. This analysis followed a precise common scheme, which allowed a systematic approach to the problem by the experts involved. Based on the findings, failures connected to risk management and risk appraisal were identified. Three main basic issues in risk appraisal were identified: the low perception of emerging risks related to atypical accident scenarios, the lack of knowledge about related events, such as early warnings, and the incapability of current techniques in leading analysts to the identification of atypical scenarios.