Conflicts in Health and Safety Matters: Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Constraints on time and resources influence the public sector as strongly as they influence our personal lives. Experience teaches us that our desires must be tempered by hard realities....
Moving Toward a Probability-Based Risk Analysis of the Benefits and Costs of Major Rehabilitation Projects
By the year 2010, 77% of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineer's projects will be over 40 years old. The Corps wants to allocate its scarce rehabilitation funds in a cost-effective manner. To...
An Innovative Institutional Arrangement Which Incorporates the Risk Preferences of Water Users
An innovative institutional arrangement that incorporates the risk preferences of water users is being refined in Australia. It is especially relevant for river and reservoir management...
Aversion to Epistemic Uncertainties in Rational Decision Making: Effects on Engineering Risk Management
When faced with epistemic uncertainties in a decision problem, subjective expected-utility theory (SEU) implies that the only relevant characteristic of these uncertainties is the mean...
On Deciding Between the Use of Engineering Standards and Risk Analysis
Risk analysis offers advantages for the optimal design and maintenance of infrastructure, but it is not always practical to apply due to the nature of certain types of infrastructure....
Methodology for Evaluating Dredged Material Alternatives Using Risk-Cost Analysis Under Uncertainty
A methodology and a case example was presented at the 1989 Conference on Risk-Based Decision Making in Water Resources, Santa Barbara, to perform risk-cost analysis for dredged material...
Maximum and Minimum Storage Trajectories That Meet Specific Risk Levels
One of Hydro-Quebec concerns is to operate its installations so as to satisfy the operating constraints. This paper describes a mathematical tool that enables the utility company to state...
System Engineering and Risk
System engineering means many things to many people, but there is a large group of practicing engineers in the defense and energy sectors who define system engineering as a structured...
Remediation Site Prioritization by the Risk Ranking and Filtering Method
The risk ranking and filtering (RRF) method, developed for ranking critical components of the NASA Space Shuttle, is a possible framework for the prioritization of hazardous-waste sites...
The Role of Risk Analysis in Feasibility Studies of Water Resources Projects
Many parameters involved in feasibility studies of water resources projects are inherently uncertain. Projections of these parameters based upon extension of past trends can be quite inaccurate....
The Use of Influence Diagrams in Risk Management Involving Multiple Stakeholders
In this paper, a new methodology is proposed that employs influence diagrams to integrate the issues that arise in risk management and to demonstrate the relationship amoung the stakeholders...
Optimal Allocation of Resources in Repair and Maintenance of Bridge Structures
The structural design process, examined in its entirety (and taking into account the uncertainty and randomness that characterize the governing parameters) is a decisional process, involving...
A Probabilistic Regional Damage Estimation Model for Earthquake Occurrences
In this paper we present a model for estimating regional earthquake damage. The model utilizes the relational data base management system ORACLE and the geographic information system ARC/INFO...
Probabilistic Evaluation of Redundancy of Bridge Structures
Redundancy of bridge structures and methods to evaluate redundancy are reviewed in this paper. A method to measure redundancy based on the existing theories of probability as related to...
Estimates of Extreme Wind Distribution Tails
The assumption that extreme winds have a Gumbel distribution appears to yield unrealistically high failure probability estimates for wind-sensitive structures. For this reason we study...
Fabric Related Probabilistic Model for Granular Materials
A new anisotropic noncoaxial incremental constitutive model for granular materials (Jahedi et al., 1990) was developed, in which a Fabric reconstruction factor '?+',...
Construction Loads on Floors: Results of a Survey
A survey of post-shorting construction loads on floors of multi-storey buildings is described. The estimated parameters of a probabilistic model of the peak (transient) loads are reported....
Risk Based Optimal Fatigue Testing
Optimal fatigue life testing of materials is considered. Based on minimization of the total expected costs of a mechanical component a strategy is suggested to determine the optimal stress...
Risk Based Structural Optimization
Risk based structural optimization problems for structural systems are formulated on basis of a so-called risk index. The risk index is defined as a consequence modified reliability index...
ASCE Review and Publication Process for Technical Journals
For many, the review and publication process for ASCE technical journals is not clear. Though the basic steps are outlined in the Authors' Guide, there are unwritten practices that may...
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