Evaluation of Corporate Sustainability

As a consequence of an increasing demand in sustainable development for business organizations, the evaluation of corporate sustainability has become a topic intensively focused by academic researchers and business practitioners. Several techniques in the context of multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA) have been suggested to facilitate the evaluation and the analysis of sustainability performance. However, due to the complexity of evaluation, such as a compilation of quantitative and qualitative measures, interrelationships among various sustainability criteria, the assessor’s hesitation in scoring, or incomplete information, simple techniques may not be able to generate reliable results which can reflect the overall sustainability performance of a company. This paper proposes a series of mathematical formulations based upon the evidential reasoning (ER) approach which can be used to aggregate results from qualitative judgments with quantitative measurements under various types of complex and uncertain situations. The evaluation of corporate sustainability through the ER model is demonstrated using actual data generated from three sugar manufacturing companies in Thailand. The proposed model facilitates managers in analysing the performance and identifying improvement plans and goals. It also simplifies decision making related to sustainable development initiatives. The model can be generalized to a wider area of performance assessment, as well as to any cases of multiple criteria analysis

Safety Culture Monitoring: A Management Approach for Assessing Nuclear Safety Culture Health Performance Utilizing Multiple-Criteria Decision Analysis

Nuclear power plants are among the most technologically complex of all energy facilities. This complexity reflects the precision needed in design, maintenance and operations to harness the energy of the atom safely, reliably and economically. Nuclear energy thus requires consistent, high levels of organizational performance by the highly skilled professionals who operate and maintain nuclear power plants (Nuclear Energy Institute [NEI], 2014, p. 1). A key element for achieving consistent, high levels of performance in a nuclear organization is its safety culture. Nuclear safety culture is for an organization what character and personality is for an individual: a feature that is made visible primarily through behaviors and espoused values. Nuclear safety culture is undergoing constant change. It represents the collective behaviors of the organization, which change as the organization and its members change and apply themselves to their daily activities. As problems arise, the organization learns from them. Successes and failures become ingrained in the organization’s nuclear safety culture and form the basis on which the organization conducts business. These behaviors are taught to new members of the organization as the correct way to perceive, think, act and feel (NEI, 2014, p. 1). Nuclear Safety Culture (NSC) is defined as the core values and behaviors resulting from a collective commitment by leaders and individuals to emphasize safety over competing goals to ensure protection of people and the environment (Institute of Nuclear Power Operations [INPO], 2012a, p. iv). Thus, nuclear safety culture depends on every employee, from the board of directors, to the control room operator, to the field technician in the switchyard, to the security officers and to contractors on site. That is, nuclear safety culture is affected by everything we say and everything we do. Nuclear safety is a collective responsibility meaning no one in the organization is exempt from the obligation to ensure nuclear safety first (NEI, 2014, p. 1). Furthermore, NSC is a leadership responsibility. Leaders reinforce safety culture at every opportunity so that the health of safety culture is not taken for granted. Leaders frequently measure the health of safety culture with a focus on trends rather than absolute values. Leaders communicate what constitutes a healthy safety culture and ensure everyone understands his or her role in its promotion. Leaders recognize that safety culture is not all or nothing but is, rather, constantly moving along a continuum. As a result, there is a comfort in discussing safety culture within the organization as well as with outside groups, such as regulatory agencies (INPO, 2012a). That is, NSC like everything else rises and falls based on leadership (Maxwell, 1998). In order to facilitate a healthy NSC, which is the sine qua non of safe nuclear plant operation, the leadership team needs to understand its present health in order to address NSC issues. It has been said “To manage risk, one has first to comprehend it” (Gheorghe, 2005, p. xvii). Equally true, in order to manage the nuclear safety culture of an organization we must first comprehend it. The goal of this research is to provide an ongoing holistic, objective, transparent and safety-focused process to identify early indications of potential problems linked to culture. The process uses a cross-section of available data (e.g., the corrective action program, performance trends, NRC inspections, industry evaluations, nuclear safety culture assessments, self-assessments, audits, operating experience, workforce issues and employee concerns program and other process inputs). These data are then analyzed utilizing Multiple-criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) methodology that incorporates belief degrees of the management team leading to insights about its meaning which may lead directly to corrective actions

Evidential Reasoning Approach to Behavioural Analysis of ICT Users’ Security Awareness

The role of ICT system’s user should be taken into consideration when developing different information security solutions because user, as its constitutive element, can significantly affect overall system security with his/her potentially risky behaviour depending on the level of user’s security awareness. In this paper authors propose risk assessment approach of ICT users’ behaviour based on the evidential reasoning technique. Performance testing was compared using combination of cluster analysis and discriminant analysis while empirical analysis was conducted on the total of 627 e-mail users grouped regarding gender, age, technical background knowledge and level of experience. Assessment methodology used in this paper has proven to be well suited for evaluation of users’ awareness and identification of their potentially risky behaviour. Results of empirical analysis showed that all groups of users got overall utility grade higher than the simulated "minimally enough aware" user, but less than “average awareness” grade. As users of all groups are highly critical towards collocutor, it can mean that users are quite aware about the importance of information security foundation, but also about lack of knowledge regarding different security issues. Another possible reason may be the users’ negligence toward security guidelines and protocols

Advanced uncertainty modelling for container port risk analysis.

Globalization has led to a rapid increase of container movements in seaports. Risks in seaports need to be appropriately addressed to ensure economic wealth, operational efficiency, and personnel safety. As a result, the safety performance of a Container Terminal Operational System (CTOS) plays a growing role in improving the efficiency of international trade. This paper proposes a novel method to facilitate the application of Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) in assessing the safety performance of CTOS. The new approach is developed through incorporating a Fuzzy Rule-Based Bayesian Network (FRBN) with Evidential Reasoning (ER) in a complementary manner. The former provides a realistic and flexible method to describe input failure information for risk estimates of individual hazardous events (HEs) at the bottom level of a risk analysis hierarchy. The latter is used to aggregate HEs safety estimates collectively, allowing dynamic risk-based decision support in CTOS from a systematic perspective. The novel feature of the proposed method, compared to those in traditional port risk analysis lies in a dynamic model capable of dealing with continually changing operational conditions in ports. More importantly, a new sensitivity analysis method is developed and carried out to rank the HEs by taking into account their specific risk estimations (locally) and their Risk Influence (RI) to a port's safety system (globally). Due to its generality, the new approach can be tailored for a wide range of applications in different safety and reliability engineering and management systems, particularly when real time risk ranking is required to measure, predict, and improve the associated system safety performance

Condition monitoring of marine and offshore machinery using evidential reasoning techniques

This paper first assesses the operational uncertainties of a particular piece of equipment in a marine and offshore system based on an oil analysis technique. Trend analysis, family analysis, environmental analysis, human reliability analysis and design analysis for each criterion are aggregated using evidential reasoning (ER) and analytical hierarchy process (AHP) algorithms. Data is collected from available statistics and supplemented by expert judgement from the related industry. The results provided in this study will be beneficial to the marine and offshore industries as indicators for monitoring and diagnosis of faults in machinery and thus assist practitioners in making better decisions in their maintenance management process. Furthermore, by changing the conditions that affect the operation of machinery, and through calculating a value for this operation, a benchmark for condition monitoring is constructed. The operational condition of machinery depends on many variables and their dependencies; thus, alteration of a criterion value will ultimately alter the operational conditions of the machinery. For any deviation to be corrected in a timely manner, the operational condition of the machinery has to be monitored properly and frequently

Risk Quadruplet: Integrating Assessments of Threat, Vulnerability, Consequence, and Perception for Homeland Security and Homeland Defense

Risk for homeland security and homeland defense is often considered to be a function of threat, vulnerability, and consequence. But what is that function? And are we defining and measuring these terms consistently? Threat, vulnerability, and consequence assessments are conducted, often separately, and data from one assessment could be drastically different from that of another due to inconsistent definitions of terms and measurements, differing data collection methods, or varying data sources. It has also long been a challenge to integrate these three disparate assessments to establish an overall picture of risk to a given asset. Further, many agencies conduct these assessments and there is little to no sharing of data, methodologies, or results vertically (between federal, state, and local decision-makers) or horizontally (across the many different sectors), which results in duplication of efforts and conflicting risk assessment results. Obviously, risk is a function of our perceptions and those perceptions can influence our understanding of threat, vulnerability, and consequence. Some assessments rely on perceptions (elicited from subject matter experts) in order to qualify or quantify threat, vulnerability, and consequence. Others exclude perception altogether, relying on objective data, if available. Rather than fault the subjectivity of our perceptions, or muddle objective assessments with personal opinions, it makes sense to embrace our perceptions, but segregate them as a unique component of risk. A risk quadruplet is proposed to systematically collect and integrate assessments of threat, vulnerability, consequence, and perception, such that each dimension can be explored uniquely, and such that all four components can be aggregated into an overall risk assessment in a consistent, transparent, traceable, and reproducible manner. The risk quadruplet draws from the fields of homeland security, homeland defense, systems engineering, and even psychology to develop a model of risk that integrates all four assessments using multicriteria decision analysis. The model has undergone preliminary validation and has proven to be a viable solution for ranking assets based on the four proposed components of risk

An approach to the assessment of potentially risky behaviour of ICT systems’ users

Korisnika informacijsko komunikacijskog sustava treba promatrati njegovim sastavnim dijelom, jer korisnik svojim rizičnim ponašanjem može značajno utjecati na ukupnu razinu sigurnosti sustava. Cilj rada je razviti postupak modeliranja sustava za procjenu rizičnog ponašanja korisnika. Ontologija i OWL simbolički jezik su odabrani za izradu strukture semantičkog modela odnosno formalizaciju prikupljenog znanja iz domene "ponašanja korisnika sustava sa stajališta sigurnosti". Za procjenu ponašanja odabran je algoritam za evidencijsko zaključivanje koji se koristi za pocjenu stanja te omogućuje usporedbu zatečenog stanja više sustava. Dobiveni normirani rezultati obrade su dali ocjenu ponašanja korisnika u rasponu od 0,066 za naivno do 1,000 za "paranoidno" ponašanje. U radu je prikazan način upotrebe algoritma za evidencijsko zaključivanje prilikom procjene ljudskog dijela tehničkog sustava, način procjene cijele grupe umjesto pojedinačnog procjenjivanja te su definirani uvjeti mapiranja algoritma i ontološke strukture.Information and Communication Technology system’s user should be considered as system’s component, because user’s behaviour can significantly affect the system’s security level. The aim of this paper is to develop an assessment method for user’s potentially risky behaviour. Ontology and OWL symbolic language have been chosen in order to define the semantic model and to formalize the knowledge of the domain on "user’s potentially risky behaviour". The Evidential Reasoning algorithm has been chosen for assessment of user’s behaviour. The normalized results for assessment on user’s behaviour give an interval ranging from 0,066 for the "naïve" user to 1,000 for the "paranoid" system’s user which can be used for reference in future work. This paper shows how to use the Evidential Reasoning algorithm to evaluate the human part of a technical system, how to evaluate a group of users instead of an individual evaluation. Furthermore, conditions required to map the algorithm to the ontological structure are defined

Development of an Efficient Planned Maintenance Framework for Marine and Offshore Machinery Operating under Highly Uncertain Environment

The constantly increasing complexity of marine and offshore machinery is a consequence of a constant improvement in ship powering, automation, specialisation in cargo transport, new ship types, as well as an effort to make the sea transport more economic. Therefore, the criteria of reliability, availability and maintainability have become very important factors in the process of marine machinery design, operation and maintenance. An important finding from the literature exposed that failure to marine machinery can cause both direct and indirect economic damage with a long-term financial consequence. Notably, many cases of machinery failures reported in databases were as a result of near misses and incidents which are potential accident indicators. Moreover, experience has shown that modelling of past accident events and scenarios can provide insights into how a machinery failure can be subsisted even if it is not avoidable, also a basis for risk analysis of the machinery in order to reveal its vulnerabilities. This research investigates the following modelling approach in order to improve the efficiency of marine and offshore machinery operating under highly uncertain environment. Firstly, this study makes full use of evidential reasoning’s advantage to propose a novel fuzzy evidential reasoning sensitivity analysis method (FER-SAM) to facilitate the assessment of operational uncertainties (trend analysis, family analysis, environmental analysis, design analysis, and human reliability analysis) in ship cranes. Secondly, a fuzzy rule based sensitivity analysis methodology is proposed as a maintenance prediction model for oil-wetted gearbox and bearing with emphasis on ship cranes by formulating a fuzzy logic box (diagnostic table), which provides the ship crane operators with a means to predict possible impending failure without having to dismantle the crane. Thirdly, experience has shown that it is not financially possible to employ all the suggested maintenance strategies in the literature. Thus, this study proposed a fuzzy TOPSIS approach that can help the maintenance engineers to select appropriate strategies aimed at enhancing the performance of the marine and offshore machinery. Finally, the developed models are integrated in order to facilitate a generic planned maintenance framework for robust improvement and management, especially in situations where conventional planned maintenance techniques cannot be implemented with confidence due to data deficiency