Exploratory Assessment of Roadway Infrastructure Adaptation to the Impacts of Sea-level Rise

Transportation agencies in coastal urban areas face a significant challenge to enhance the long-term resilience of their networks to flooding and storm surge events exacerbated by sea level rise. The problem of sea-level rise adaptation is characterized by deep uncertainty that makes it complex to assess the value of adaptation investments. To enable informed adaptation decisions, the present study created a dynamic stochastic modeling framework based on the theoretical underpinnings of complex adaptive systems that integrates: (i) stochastic simulation of sea-level rise stressors based on the data obtained from downscaled climate studies pertaining to future projections of sea-level and precipitation; (ii) dynamic modeling of roadway conditions by considering regular decay of roadways, as well as structural damages caused by storm surge events; and (iii) a decision-theoretic modeling of agency infrastructure management and adaptation processes based on cognitive psychology, bounded rationality, and regret theories. In this framework, resilience is examined based on trend changes in the network performance measures (e.g., life cycle costs and performance). The created framework and model were tested in a case study related to the road network of the city of Miami-Beach, which global assessments rank first iv among the world\u27s urban areas most exposed to sea-level rise risks. The results indicated that: (i) SLR Adaptation investment and life cycle costs of roadway infrastructure are negatively correlated. In addition, it was shown that the sensitivity of network’s life cycle cost to actual sea-level rise scenario decreases when adaptation investment increases. These finding emphasize the importance of proactive improvement of the network resilience to alleviate the long-term costs of sea-level rise. (ii) When funding is sufficient for all required adaptation actions, mid-term adaptation planning yields lower life cycle cost. When funding is insufficient, aggregated investment in long-term adaptation planning intervals yields lower network LCC. These findings imply that different adaptation planning approaches should be taken for different levels of adaptation investment. (iii) The agency’s perception of SLR and risk attitude do not have significant effect on life cycle cost of roadway networks. Hence, implementation of adaptation action based on any perception of sea-level rise and risk attitude can significantly reduce the life cycle costs of roadway networks under the impacts of SLR. (iv) The devised performance target has negative correlation with life cycle cost of a roadway network affected by SLR impacts. Therefore, compromising the network performance condition will never result in lower life cycle costs

Epidemics of Liquidity Shortages in Interbank Markets

Financial contagion from liquidity shocks has being recently ascribed as a prominent driver of systemic risk in interbank lending markets. Building on standard compartment models used in epidemics, in this work we develop an EDB (Exposed-Distressed-Bankrupted) model for the dynamics of liquidity shocks reverberation between banks, and validate it on electronic market for interbank deposits data. We show that the interbank network was highly susceptible to liquidity contagion at the beginning of the 2007/2008 global financial crisis, and that the subsequent micro-prudential and liquidity hoarding policies adopted by banks increased the network resilience to systemic risk---yet with the undesired side effect of drying out liquidity from the market. We finally show that the individual riskiness of a bank is better captured by its network centrality than by its participation to the market, along with the currently debated concept of "too interconnected to fail"

Methodologies for Evaluating Information Security Investments - What Basel II Can Change in the Financial Industry

The New Basel Capital Accord (Basel II) will include operational risk to the calculation of necessary regulatory capital in financial institutions after year-end 2006. Most of the banks have already developed sophisticated risk management frameworks helping to quantify and manage operational risk. Information security has direct impact on operational risk, but risk managers consider Information Systems (IS) related risks not enough by now. This problem mainly depends on the variety of methods used by security managers to evaluate systems security and to develop security concepts. Even little efforts would enable information security officers to quantify the benefits of information security investments using operational risk quantification methods. The security community has not yet addressed this opportunity. The article discusses models used for decisions about security investments known from the field of security economics and accounting and illustrates the problems by applying these models. Based on a general operational risk management framework of a bank, this article introduces a new approach using accepted risk management methods

Assessing Needs of Care in European Nations. ENEPRI Policy Brief No. 14, 28 December 2012

This Policy Brief presents the research questions, main results and policy implications and recommendations of the seven Work Packages that formed the basis of the ANCIEN research project, financed under the 7th EU Research Framework Programme of the European Commission. Carried out over a 44-month period and involving 20 partners from EU member states, the project principally concerns the future of long-term care (LTC) for the elderly in Europe and addresses two questions in particular: How will need, demand, supply and use of LTC develop? How do different systems of LTC perform

Anatomy of Welfare Reform Evaluation:Announcement and Implementation Effects

This paper formulates a simple model of female labor force decisions which embeds an in-work benefit reform and explicitly allows for announcement and implementation effects. We explore several mechanisms through which women can respond to the announcement of a reform that increases in-work benefits, including sources of intertemporal substitution, human capital accumulation, and labor market frictions. Using the model�s insights and information of the precise timing of the announcement and implementation of a major UK in-work benefit reform, we estimate its effects on single mothers� behavior. We find large and positive announcement effects on employment decisions. We show that this finding is consistent with the presence of frictions in the labor market. The impact evaluations of this reform which ignore such effects produce implementation effect estimates that are biased downwards by 15 to 35 percent.

Collusion in Peer-to-Peer Systems

Peer-to-peer systems have reached a widespread use, ranging from academic and industrial applications to home entertainment. The key advantage of this paradigm lies in its scalability and flexibility, consequences of the participants sharing their resources for the common welfare. Security in such systems is a desirable goal. For example, when mission-critical operations or bank transactions are involved, their effectiveness strongly depends on the perception that users have about the system dependability and trustworthiness. A major threat to the security of these systems is the phenomenon of collusion. Peers can be selfish colluders, when they try to fool the system to gain unfair advantages over other peers, or malicious, when their purpose is to subvert the system or disturb other users. The problem, however, has received so far only a marginal attention by the research community. While several solutions exist to counter attacks in peer-to-peer systems, very few of them are meant to directly counter colluders and their attacks. Reputation, micro-payments, and concepts of game theory are currently used as the main means to obtain fairness in the usage of the resources. Our goal is to provide an overview of the topic by examining the key issues involved. We measure the relevance of the problem in the current literature and the effectiveness of existing philosophies against it, to suggest fruitful directions in the further development of the field

A stochastic Reputation System Architecture to support the Partner Selection in Virtual Organisations

In recent business environments, collaborations among organisations raise an increased demand for swift establishment. Such collaborations are increasingly formed without prior experience of the other partner\u27s previous performance. The STochastic REputation system (STORE) is designed to provide swift, automated decision support for selecting partner organisations. STORE is based on a stochastic trust model and evaluated by means of multi agent simulations in Virtual Organisation scenarios

Actor based behavioural simulation as an aid for organisational decision making

Decision-making is a critical activity for most of the modern organizations to stay competitive in rapidly changing business environment. Effective organisational decision-making requires deep understanding of various organisational aspects such as its goals, structure, business-as-usual operational processes, environment where it operates, and inherent characteristics of the change drivers that may impact the organisation. The size of a modern organisation, its socio-technical characteristics, inherent uncertainty, volatile operating environment, and prohibitively high cost of the incorrect decisions make decision-making a challenging endeavor. While the enterprise modelling and simulation technologies have evolved into a mature discipline for understanding a range of engineering, defense and control systems, their application in organisational decision-making is considerably low. Current organisational decision-making approaches that are prevalent in practice are largely qualitative. Moreover, they mostly rely on human experts who are often aided with the primitive technologies such as spreadsheets and visual diagrams. This thesis argues that the existing modelling and simulation technologies are neither suitable to represent organisation and decision artifacts in a comprehensive and machine-interpretable form nor do they comprehensively address the analysis needs. An approach that advances the modelling abstraction and analysis machinery for organisational decision-making is proposed. In particular, this thesis proposes a domain specific language to represent relevant aspects of an organisation for decision-making, establishes the relevance of a bottom-up simulation technique as a means for analysis, and introduces a method to utilise the proposed modelling abstraction, analysis technique, and analysis machinery in an effective and convenient manner