On the use of criteria based on the SMART acronym to assess quality of performance indicators for safety management in process industries

Management of safety, and barriers in particular, includes using information expressing performance, i.e. use of safety performance indicators. For this information to be useful, the indicators should demonstrate adequate quality. In other words, they should satisfy some predefined set of quality criteria. Without showing adequate quality, the indicators are generally unable to provide sufficient support for barrier management, which could result in poor decisions. In this article, the use of the SMART criteria is considered to assess the quality of safety performance indicators in process industries. SMART being an acronym for ‘specificity’, ‘measurability’ or ‘manageability’, ‘achievability’, ‘relevancy’ and ‘time-based’, covering five key aspects and criteria for assessing the quality of an indicator. A discussion on whether the indicators are able to demonstrate adequate quality by satisfying these criteria has been conducted. The finding is that all of the SMART criteria should be satisfied for a safety performance indicator to demonstrate acceptable quality and to be regarded as useful to support barrier management decision-making. However, it has also been observed that including the ‘M’ criterion in the assessment of quality is not needed. When all the other criteria are satisfied there is no way the conclusions could be misleading as a result of measurability or manageability aspects. Hence, for safety performance indicator quality, only four of the criteria are assessed and suggested for such situations to shorten the acronym to ‘STAR’. A key safety indicator used in downstream process facilities, i.e. ‘dangerous fluid overfilling events’, motivated from the 2005 Texas City refinery accident, is used to illustrate the situation. The indicator is also applied to another incident, the Buncefield oil storage depot's accident in 2005, to provide a broader context for using it. The findings in this article could also be applied beyond the context studied. This means that, despite focusing on safety indicators in the process industries, the findings are considered as relevant and applicable to other types of performance indicators and to other energy industries.publishedVersio

Quantum Mechanics as a Framework for Dealing with Uncertainty

Quantum uncertainty is described here in two guises: indeterminacy with its concomitant indeterminism of measurement outcomes, and fuzziness, or unsharpness. Both features were long seen as obstructions of experimental possibilities that were available in the realm of classical physics. The birth of quantum information science was due to the realization that such obstructions can be turned into powerful resources. Here we review how the utilization of quantum fuzziness makes room for a notion of approximate joint measurement of noncommuting observables. We also show how from a classical perspective quantum uncertainty is due to a limitation of measurability reflected in a fuzzy event structure -- all quantum events are fundamentally unsharp.Comment: Plenary Lecture, Central European Workshop on Quantum Optics, Turku 2009

Uncertainty reconciles complementarity with joint measurability

The fundamental principles of complementarity and uncertainty are shown to be related to the possibility of joint unsharp measurements of pairs of noncommuting quantum observables. A new joint measurement scheme for complementary observables is proposed. The measured observables are represented as positive operator valued measures (POVMs), whose intrinsic fuzziness parameters are found to satisfy an intriguing pay-off relation reflecting the complementarity. At the same time, this relation represents an instance of a Heisenberg uncertainty relation for measurement imprecisions. A model-independent consideration show that this uncertainty relation is logically connected with the joint measurability of the POVMs in question.Comment: 4 pages, RevTeX. Title of previous version: "Complementarity and uncertainty - entangled in joint path-interference measurements". This new version focuses on the "measurement uncertainty relation" and its role, disentangling this issue from the special context of path interference duality. See also http://www.vjquantuminfo.org (October 2003

Uncertainty Relations for Joint Localizability and Joint Measurability in Finite-Dimensional Systems

Two quantities quantifying uncertainty relations are examined. In J.Math.Phys. 48, 082103 (2007), Busch and Pearson investigated the limitation on joint localizability and joint measurement of position and momentum by introducing overall width and error bar width. In this paper, we show a simple relationship between these quantities for finite-dimensional systems. Our result indicates that if there is a bound on joint localizability, it is possible to obtain a similar bound on joint measurability. For finite-dimensional systems, uncertainty relations for a pair of general projection-valued measures are obtained as by-products.Comment: 10 pages. To appear in Journal of Mathematical Physic

Reforming institutions for service delivery : a framework for development assistance with an application to the health, nutrition, and population portfolio

World Development Report 1997: The State in a Changing World (report no. 17300) argued that institutions-the rules of the game that govern production and exchange-shape a country's prospects for sustained market-led growth. The author provides an institutional framework for service delivery, an essential component of state capability. He applies this framework to an evaluation of Bank support for service delivery in the health, nutrition, and population sector. He argues for greater institutional pluralism in the ways the World Bank does business in infrastructure, rural, and social sectors, but cautions against making efficient service delivery an issue of"state versus market."The Bank and its clients face the challenge of fitting menus of"better practice"delivery options to maps of institutional reality. In the health, nutrition, and population sector, the Bank should (1) unbundle and categorize essential health and clinical services according to goods characteristics and (2) integrate country knowledge into operations through upstream assessments of state, political, and social institutions. Overall, the Bank has made progress toward a"goods characteristics"approach, particularly in infrastructure and some rural services-but it has lagged in the social sectors, where support remains largely technocratic. Cross-sector comparisons reveal four generations of support for service delivery. First-generation support focused mainly on physical implementation of projects. Second-generation interventions, which characterized most social service interventions, focused on improving the financial and organizational viability of implementing agencies through technical assistance. Third-generation support was marked by significant unbundling of service delivery activities and clearer links to goods characteristics. In irrigation (1982-94), telecommunications (1980s-present), and transport (1990s), the one-size-fits-all monopoly model gave way to a range of options based on greater private sector and citizen participation in delivery. These included leases, concessions, outsourcing, and contracting as well as building, operating, transfer, and turnover schemes. Fourth-generation interventions are works-in-progress and represent efforts to develop new governance arrangements that systematically combine competition, voice, and hierarchy in the design, delivery, and monitoring of Bank projects. The Bank has a poor track record building country knowledge of institutional endowments that affect service delivery. The author identifies concepts and tools valuable for sector specialists'operations.Enterprise Development&Reform,Public Health Promotion,Health Economics&Finance,Decentralization,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Governance Indicators,Poverty Assessment,Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Health Economics&Finance

Towards a certification of biomass: Feasibility of a certifications scheme of sustainability standards for trade and production of bioethanol in Brazil

Bioenergy produced from biomass is increasingly used to substitute fossil energy sources. Trade of biomass is expected to increase in the following years due to disparities in production costs and potentials in countries and regions. In this paper the possibility of a certification scheme for minimizing negative socio-ecological impacts and for increasing a sustainable production of biomass is discussed, taking Brazilian bioethanol as an example. This case-study comes up with a first set of feasible sustainability standards for Brazilian bioethanol and discusses issues to be considered when developing sustainability standards. At the same time problematic aspects are identified. When incorporating opinions of different stakeholders, the setting of sustainability standards holds the inherent danger of being used as non-tariff trade barriers. This leads to the need for a regionalisation of sustainability standards and raises questions on structure and level of a certification scheme.certification, sustainability standards, bioethanol, Environmental Economics and Policy, Institutional and Behavioral Economics, International Relations/Trade, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy, F18, Q24,