Strategic risk management in water utilities: development of a holistic approach linking risks and futures

Risk management plays a key role in water utilities. Although tools are well established at operational and tactical levels of management, existing methods at strategic level lack a holistic treatment and a long-term perspective. In fact, risks are analysed per se, despite being interconnected; and long-term scenarios are commonly used for strategic planning, rather than for risk management, most of the time being related to one single issue (for example: climate change). In order to overcome the limitations identified in the existing methodologies, a novel approach for water utilities to manage risk at strategic level was developed and tested in EPAL - the largest and oldest water utility in Portugal. It consists of (i) setting a baseline risks comparison founded on a systemic model developed ‗bottom-up‘ through the business; (ii) the construction of future scenarios and an observation of how baseline risks may change with time. Major contributions of this research are the linkage between operational and strategic risks, capturing the interdependencies between strategic risks; the ability to look at long term risk, allowing the visualizing of the way strategic risks may change under a possible future scenario; and the novel coupling of risks and futures research. For the water sector, this approach constitutes a useful tool for strategic planning, which may be presented to the Board of Directors in a simple and intuitive way, despite the solid foundations of the underlying analysis. It also builds on in-house expertise, promoting the dissemination and pervasiveness of risk management within the companies and, on the other hand, allowing unveiling of existing knowledge, making it explicit and more useful for the organization

On Delphi Lemmas And Other Memoing Techniques For Deterministic Logic Programs

answers are most general computed answers of deterministic logic programs obtained through repeated applications of a simple clause composition operator. After describing a meta-interpreter returning abstract answers we derive a class of program transformations that compute abstract answers more efficiently: they are ideal lemmas due to their goal independent nature. For this reason their `hit rate' is usually higher than in the case of conventional memoing. Indexing by structural properties of terms is an effective way to speed up retrieval of lemmas especially in the case of simple programs using linear recursion. Delphi Lemmas add a self-adjusting control mechanism on the amount of memoing. Answers are memoized only by acquiescence of an oracle. We Revised version of the paper Memoing with Abstract Answers and Delphi Lemmas presented at the LOPSTR'93 Workshop [26]. The first author thanks for support from NSERC (grant OGP0107411), from the FESR of the Universit'e de Moncton, an..

On Delphi Lemmas And Other Memoing Techniques For Deterministic Logic Programs

answers are most general computed answers of deterministic logic programs obtained through repeated applications of a simple clause composition operator. After describing a meta-interpreter returning abstract answers we derive a class of program transformations that compute abstract answers more efficiently: they are ideal lemmas due to their goal independent nature. For this reason their `hit rate' is usually higher than in the case of conventional memoing. Indexing by structural properties of terms is an effective way to speed up retrieval of lemmas especially in the case of simple programs using linear recursion. Delphi Lemmas add a self-adjusting control mechanism on the amount of memoing. Answers are memoized only by acquiescence of an oracle. We Revised version of the paper Memoing with Abstract Answers and Delphi Lemmas presented at the LOPSTR'93 Workshop [26]. The first author thanks for support from NSERC (grant OGP0107411), from the FESR of the Universit'e de Moncton, an..