That is what most of us believe most of the time. They do happen, of course, sometimes with alarming frequency, sometimes with calamitous results. We explain these unnatural events as the consequences of lack of foresight, poor design, poor engineering andlor errors by some person or persons. Improve the design and production, admonish or train the persons to be more careful (less careless?) and they won't happen. It is easy to think of examples in the home, the laboratory, the office ... and in the public domain -for example, Chernobyl, Challenger, Bhopal, The Herald of Free Enterprise, King's Cross. The premise leads to an explanation of the cause, which in turn leads to the public inquiry recommending some action to prevent a similar accident occumng again. Chernobyl, for example, was blamed on a combination of unsatisfactory design and operator error. So also was the Zeebrugge disaster. So also ... and it is easy to make a long list including Flixborough, Torrey Canyon, Three Mile Island (TMI), to which King's Cross will probably soon be added. In each case the inquiry has prescribed corrective action based on this 'accidents are unnatural' (AAU) model: a technological fix plus wrist-slapping. In well-established technologies, in which we have many thousands or even millions of operating hours of experience. the repeated application of this process should by now have reduced the accident rate to zero -or, at the very least, to very nearly zero. Not a bit of it; there are no signs of this happening, and in some technologies the rate is rising. Could it be that we have got something wrong in our explanation?

Normal accidents. Living with high-risk technologies

Social Vulnerability to Environmental Hazards

. Damage assessments of natural hazards supply crucial information to decision support and policy development in the fields of natural hazard management and adaptation planning to climate change. Specifically, the estimation of economic flood damage is gaining greater importance as flood risk management is becoming the dominant approach of flood control policies throughout Europe. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art and identifies research directions of economic flood damage assessment. Despite the fact that considerable research effort has been spent and progress has been made on damage data collection, data analysis and model development in recent years, there still seems to be a mismatch between the relevance of damage assessments and the quality of the available models and datasets. Often, simple approaches are used, mainly due to limitations in available data and knowledge on damage mechanisms. The results of damage assessments depend on many assumptions, e.g. the selection of spatial and temporal boundaries, and there are many pitfalls in economic evaluation, e.g. the choice between replacement costs or depreciated values. Much larger efforts are required for empirical and synthetic data collection and for providing consistent, reliable data to scientists and practitioners. A major shortcoming of damage modelling is that model validation is scarcely performed. Uncertainty analyses and thorough scrutiny of model inputs and assumptions should be mandatory for each damage model development and application, respectively. In our view, flood risk assessments are often not well balanced. Much more attention is given to the hazard assessment part, whereas damage assessment is treated as some kind of appendix within the risk analysis. Advances in flood damage assessment could trigger subsequent methodological improvements in other natural hazard areas with comparable time-space properties.

/pdf/review-article-assessment-of-economic-flood-damage-2cxqtnpv6j.pdf

Review article "Assessment of economic flood damage"

Economic systems are increasingly prone to complexity and uncertainty. Therefore, making well-informed decisions requires risk analysis, control and mitigation. In some areas such as finance, insurance, crisis management and health care, the importance of considering risk is largely acknowledged and well-elaborated, yet rather heterogeneous concepts and approaches for risk management have been developed. The increased frequency and the severe consequences of past supply chain disruptions have resulted in an increasing interest in risk. This development has led to the adoption of the risk concepts, terminologies and methods from related fields. In this paper, existing approaches for quantitative supply chain risk management are reviewed by setting the focus on the definition of supply chain risk and related concepts.

/pdf/a-critical-review-on-supply-chain-risk-definition-measure-fqpdp1tneu.pdf

A critical review on supply chain risk – Definition, measure and modeling ☆

Decision making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) is considered as an effective method for the identification of cause-effect chain components of a complex system. It deals with evaluating interdependent relationships among factors and finding the critical ones through a visual structural model. Over the recent decade, a large number of studies have been done on the application of DEMATEL and many different variants have been put forward in the literature. The objective of this study is to review systematically the methodologies and applications of the DEMATEL technique. We reviewed a total of 346 papers published from 2006 to 2016 in the international journals. According to the approaches used, these publications are grouped into five categories: classical DEMATEL, fuzzy DEMATEL, grey DEMATEL, analytical network process- (ANP-) DEMATEL, and other DEMATEL. All papers with respect to each category are summarized and analyzed, pointing out their implementing procedures, real applications, and crucial findings. This systematic and comprehensive review holds valuable insights for researchers and practitioners into using the DEMATEL in terms of indicating current research trends and potential directions for further research.

/pdf/dematel-technique-a-systematic-review-of-the-state-of-the-1p9nnc0aaq.pdf

DEMATEL Technique: A Systematic Review of the State-of-the-Art Literature on Methodologies and Applications

In the event of natural disasters, industrial production sites can be affected by both direct physical damage and indirect damage. The indirect damage, which often exceeds the direct ones in value, mainly arises from business interruptions resulting from the impairment of information and material flows as well as from domino effects in interlaced supply chains. The importance of industry for society and the domino effects often result in severe economic, social, and environmental consequences of industrial disasters making industrial risk management an important task for risk managers at the administrative level (e.g. civil protection authorities). Since the possible industrial disaster damage depends not only on hazard and exposure but also on the vulnerability of a system, an effective and efficient industrial risk management requires information about the system’s regionalized vulnerability. This paper presents a new methodology for structural industrial vulnerability assessment based on production fac...

A composite indicator model to assess natural disaster risks in industry on a spatial level

For risk analyses not only knowledge about the impact of different types of hazards, but also information about the elements and values at risk is necessary. This article introduces a methodology for a countrywide estimation of asset values for commercial and industrial properties using Germany as an example. It consists of a financial appraisal of asset values on the municipal level and a further disaggregation by means of land use data. Novelties are the distinction of 60 economic activities, the consideration of production site sizes and the application of a dasymetric mapping technique for a sector-specific estimation and disaggregation of asset values. A validation with empirical data confirms the feasibility of the calculation. The resulting maps can be used for loss estimations e.g. in the framework of cost–benefit analyses that aim to evaluate hazard mitigation measures or for portfolio analyses by banks and insurance companies. The approach can be used for other countries if the necessary data is available (mainly in industrialized countries). In any case, it reveals the critical points when estimating commercial and industrial asset values.

Estimation of industrial and commercial asset values for hazard risk assessment

Purpose – Power outages which may be triggered, for example, by natural hazards and system failures are a common phenomenon, associated with large impacts on society including the healthcare sector Minimising adverse impacts effectively requires an analysis of possible impacts and the identification of measures aiming at reducing vulnerability and increasing resilienceDesign/methodology/approach – To systematically identify impacts as well as preparation, mitigation and recovery (PMR) measures, a moderated workshop with participants representing different healthcare sub‐sectors in Germany was conducted and complemented by semi‐structured interviews and a thorough analysis of literature Impacts were determined for three scenarios of power outage duration, 24 hoursFindings – Whereas hospitals are in general well prepared with respect to shorter outages, due to obligatory emergency power in Germany, outpatient medical care, nursing homes (NH) and, in particular, home‐care nursing are early 

Scenario‐based impact analysis of a power outage on healthcare facilities in Germany

When natural disasters and extreme events such as storms, floods and earthquakes occur, it is not only people, residential buildings and infrastructure that are seriously affected, but also industry. Direct losses to installations as well as indirect losses, e.g., the interruption of production, can cause severe damage to companies and the economy as a whole. For a comparative and quantitative risk assessment, and being a prerequisite for

/pdf/the-reference-installation-approach-for-the-estimation-of-26hn7gxwrt.pdf

The reference installation approach for the estimation of industrial assets at risk

Assessment of Industrial Asset Values at Risk

Handle everyday research tasks with reliable, citation-backed results

Your personal Research Agent to handle research tasks with citation-backed results

Popular Tasks used by Researchers

How can I help with your research?

Meet SciSpace

Get more enhanced response by uploading the PDFs you want me to reference.

No relevant PDFs in your library

SciSpace is the AI research assistant for academics. Run systematic literature reviews on 280M+ papers, and write papers with cited sources. Trusted by 1M+ students, PhDs & researchers.

SciSpace | AI for Research

Analyze PDFs

Code & Manuscripts

Funding & Grants

Literature & Patents

Medical & Clinical Data

Systematic Review

Visualize & Present

Web & Data

Build a Google Scholar-like website for your research.

Build a website

Create charts and images for your research

Create a Chart

Write a paper for submission to a journal

Draft a manuscript

Patent Search

Design eye-catching scientific posters in minutes.

Scientific Poster Generation

Systematic Literature Review

One task is running at the moment. Your messages will be shown right after.

Drag and drop or click here to browse

Loved by <highlight>1 million+</highlight> researchers

Extract a list of specific topics and their sources from unstructured text

Topics

Compare and analyze relevant papers that matches with your search

Papers

Get insights from PDFs and bookmarked papers from your library

My library

Recent searches

Try searching for:

Catch AI-generated content in scholarly and non-scholarly content

{ai} Detector

Ai Writer

Get PDF Summaries, highlighted text explanations 

Chat with PDF

Effortlessly create in-text citations and bibliographies in APA and 2,500 other formats

Citation generator

Get explanations, summaries, and answers on academic papers

Ease up your research workflow with {scispace}'s cohort of exciting AI tools

Elevate your academic writing skills and convey your ideas the way you want

Paraphraser

Explore our range of reading and writing tools

Your file is being prepared and should be ready in a few minutes. If it's a large file, it might take a bit longer. You can close this window, and we'll email you the file when it's done.

You have reached a maximum limit of <strong>{limit}</strong> columns in the table. Remove at least <strong>1</strong> column to add or create another one.

M. Merz

Author Tools

Chat about Author