Large-scale disasters and the insurance industry

We investigate the effect of the 20 largest – in terms of insured losses – man-made or natural disasters on the insurance industry. We show via an event study that insurance markets worldwide are quite resilient to unexpected losses to capital and are even outperforming the general market subsequent to great disasters. --disaster,insurance industry,event-study

Resilient decision making in steam network investments

Steam is a key energy vector for industrial sites, used for process heating, direct injection and stripping, tracing and cogeneration of mechanical power. Steam networks transport steam from producers to consumers and across different pressure levels. The steam production equipments (boilers, cogeneration units and heat exchangers) should be dimensioned to always supply key consumers as well as to deal with extreme demand caused by exceptional events such as unit startups or extreme weather. An important issue to be dealt with is that of unexpected boiler shutdowns, which can take significant amounts of time to bring back online. In cases where demand surpasses the available production of steam, load shedding is necessary in order to keep the network operable. A penalty cost can be associated to load shedding. A well dimensioned steam network is one which is resilient to such events, being able to overcome extreme demand and unexpected boiler shutdowns at minimum cost. This paper proposes a methodology for evaluating the operability of a steam network when facing unexpected boiler shutdowns. A Monte-Carlo simulation is carried out on a multi-period steam network problem, randomly shutting down boilers according to their failure properties (probability of failure and duration of failure). The aim of this method is to evaluate how resilient a steam network is to boiler shutdowns. The Monte-Carlo simulation is applied to a steam network model built using a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) formulation, whose objective function is to minimise the operational costs of the steam network and therefore also to minimise the penalty costs associated to load shedding. A case study based on anonymised industrial data is used to demonstrate the method. Two investment propositions are evaluated and compared using the proposed method

Corporate Risk-Taking and the Decline of Personal Blame

The ability to maintain state awareness in the face of unexpected and unmodeled errors and threats is a defining feature of a resilient control system. Therefore, in this paper, we study the problem of distributed fault detection and isolation (FDI) in large networked systems with uncertain system models. The linear networked system is composed of interconnected subsystems and may be represented as a graph. The subsystems are represented by nodes, while the edges correspond to the interconnections between subsystems. Considering faults that may occur on the interconnections and subsystems, as our first contribution, we propose a distributed scheme to jointly detect and isolate faults occurring in nodes and edges of the system. As our second contribution, we analyze the behavior of the proposed scheme under model uncertainties caused by the addition or removal of edges. Additionally, we propose a novel distributed FDI scheme based on local models and measurements that is resilient to changes outside of the local subsystem and achieves FDI. Our third contribution addresses the complexity reduction of the distributed FDI method, by characterizing the minimum amount of model information and measurements needed to achieve FDI and by reducing the number of monitoring nodes. The proposed methods can be fused to design a scalable and resilient distributed FDI architecture that achieves local FDI despite unknown changes outside the local subsystem. The proposed approach is illustrated by numerical experiments on the IEEE 118-bus power network benchmark.QC 20141114</p

“The Same Staff Can Be Enough”. Employers’ Resilience Strategies in Recruitment Decisions

Studies on resilience have sprung from a need to understand the survival strategies of organizations when faced with the emergence of unexpected, potentially destructive and negative events in the lives of the organizations. This article, on the other hand, intends to highlight organizational resilience when confronted with unexpected positive events, seldom considered by such studies. This is the well-known macroeconomic phenomenon of the time lag between economic growth and labor demand at the moment that a regressive economic cycle is reversed. With which strategies do companies, in the face of such an event, transform a resilient attitude into real resilient behavior? Five strategies of organizational resilience are identified: Flexibility of working hours, staff re-allocation, minimization of turnover and absenteeism, job redesign, and reorganization of operations. A summary of results, managerial implications, contributions to studies and indications for future research conclude the article

Large-Scale Disasters and the Insurance Industry

We investigate the impact of the 20 largest – in terms of insured losses – man-made or natural disasters on various insurance industry stock indices. We show via an event study that insurance sectors worldwide are quite resilient, in a market–value sense, to unexpected losses to capital: our data provide evidence that equity market investors believe that insurance companies will on average be able to make losses back over the foreseeable future, i.e. that the adverse shocks to equity which have resulted from these catastrophes will be compensated by either an outward shift of the demand curve or an ability to raise premiums, or both.disaster, insurance industry, event-study

Cardiac Defense Reactivity and Cognitive Flexibility in High- and Low-Resilience Women

The present study analyzes, in a sample of 54 young women, the relationships between high or low resilience, measured with the Connor- Davidson Resilience Scale questionnaire and the Spanish adaptation of the Resilience Scale, and two indices of psychophysiological and neuropsychological adaptability, the cardiac defense response (CDR) and cognitive flexibility. The results showed that the more resilient people, in addition to having better scores on mental health questionnaires, obtained better scores in cognitive flexibility than the less resilient people. Regarding the CDR, both groups showed the typical response pattern to unexpected intense noise, with two successive accelerationdeceleration components. However, the more resilient people had a larger initial acceleration-deceleration, which is indicative of greater vagal control, than the less resilient people. No significant differences were found in the second acceleration-deceleration, which is indicative of sympathetic control. The present findings broaden the understanding of how resilient people change their adaptable responses to address environmental demands.Project PSI2014-56924-P, funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitivenes

Resilient performance in maintenance operations:managing unexpected failures

Unexpected failures of physical assets are often stated as the primary operational risk to asset-intensive organizations. Managing these failures is of critical importance to maintenance operations. This study demonstrates the operationalization and application of organizational resilience in a railway pit stop system, in order to identify changes for improvement in managing unexpected failures, using the soft systems methodology. A new ability (ability to inform) has been identified from the field as an important driver for resilient performance. Further research is needed to defend this position

Managing for the unexpected: Building resilient forest landscapes to cope with global change

Natural disturbances exacerbated by novel climate regimes are increasing worldwide, threatening the ability of forest ecosystems to mitigate global warming through car-bon sequestration and to provide other key ecosystem services. One way to cope with unknown disturbance events is to promote the ecological resilience of the forest by increasing both functional trait and structural diversity and by fostering functional connectivity of the landscape to ensure a rapid and efficient self- reorganization of the system. We investigated how expected and unexpected variations in climate and biotic disturbances affect ecological resilience and carbon storage in a forested region in southeastern Canada. Using a process- based forest landscape model (LANDIS-II), we simulated ecosystem responses to climate change and insect outbreaks under dif-ferent forest policy scenarios—including a novel approach based on functional diver-sification and network analysis—and tested how the potentially most damaging insect pests interact with changes in forest composition and structure due to changing cli-mate and management. We found that climate warming, lengthening the vegetation season, will increase forest productivity and carbon storage, but unexpected impacts of drought and insect outbreaks will drastically reduce such variables. Generalist, non- native insects feeding on hardwood are the most damaging biotic agents for our region, and their monitoring and early detection should be a priority for forest au-thorities. Higher forest diversity driven by climate-smart management and fostered by climate change that promotes warm-adapted species, might increase disturbance severity. However, alternative forest policy scenarios led to a higher functional and structural diversity as well as functional connectivity—and thus to higher ecological resilience—than conventional management. Our results demonstrate that adopting a landscape-scale perspective by planning interventions strategically in space and adopting a functional trait approach to diversify forests is promising for enhancing ecological resilience under unexpected global change stressors.MM received funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant n.175101) and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie framework (grant n.891671, REINFORCE project). NA was supported by a Juan de la Cierva fellowship of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (FCJ2020-046387-I). This work has also been supported by funding to NA and MM from the Canada Research Chair in Forest Resilience to Global Changes attributed to CM. MJF acknowledges the support of the Canada Research Chair in Spatial Ecology