Artificial Intelligence in Engineering Risk Analytics

Risks exist in every aspect of our lives, and can mean different things to different people. While negative in general they always cause a great deal of potential damage and inconvenience for stakeholders. Recent engineering risks include the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster from the 2011 tsunami, a year that also saw earthquakes in New Zealand, tornados in the US, and floods in both Australia and Thailand. Earthquakes, tornados (not to mention hurricanes) and floods are repetitive natural phenomenon. But the October 2011 floods in Thailand were the worst in 50 years, impacting supply chains including those of Honda, Toyota, Lenovo, Fujitsu, Nippon Steel, Tesco, and Canon. Human-induced tragedies included a clothing factory fire in Bangladesh in 2012 that left over 100 dead. Wal-Mart and Sears supply chains were downstream customers. The events of Bhopal in 1984, Chernobyl in 1986, Exxon Valdez in 1989, and the Gulf oil spill of 2010 were tragic accidents. There are also malicious events such as the Tokyo Sarin attach in 1995, The World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks in 2001, and terrorist attacks on subways in Madrid (2004), London (2005), and Moscow (2010). The news brings us reports of such events all too often. The next step up in intensity is war, which seems to always be with us in some form somewhere in the world. Complex human systems also cause problems. The financial crisis resulted in recession in all aspects of the economy. Risk and analytics has become an important topic in today’s more complex, interrelated global environment, replete with threats from natural, engineering, economic, and technical sources (Olson and Wu, 2015)

A Comprehensive Survey on Enterprise Financial Risk Analysis: Problems, Methods, Spotlights and Applications

Enterprise financial risk analysis aims at predicting the enterprises' future financial risk.Due to the wide application, enterprise financial risk analysis has always been a core research issue in finance. Although there are already some valuable and impressive surveys on risk management, these surveys introduce approaches in a relatively isolated way and lack the recent advances in enterprise financial risk analysis. Due to the rapid expansion of the enterprise financial risk analysis, especially from the computer science and big data perspective, it is both necessary and challenging to comprehensively review the relevant studies. This survey attempts to connect and systematize the existing enterprise financial risk researches, as well as to summarize and interpret the mechanisms and the strategies of enterprise financial risk analysis in a comprehensive way, which may help readers have a better understanding of the current research status and ideas. This paper provides a systematic literature review of over 300 articles published on enterprise risk analysis modelling over a 50-year period, 1968 to 2022. We first introduce the formal definition of enterprise risk as well as the related concepts. Then, we categorized the representative works in terms of risk type and summarized the three aspects of risk analysis. Finally, we compared the analysis methods used to model the enterprise financial risk. Our goal is to clarify current cutting-edge research and its possible future directions to model enterprise risk, aiming to fully understand the mechanisms of enterprise risk communication and influence and its application on corporate governance, financial institution and government regulation

Performance Evaluation for the Sustainable Supply Chain Management

Supply chain SC activities transform natural resources, raw materials, and components into various finished products that are delivered to end customers. A high efficient SC would bring great benefits to an enterprise such as integrated resources, reduced logistics costs, improved logistics efficiency, and high quality of overall level of services. In contrast, an inefficient SC will bring additional transaction costs, information management costs, and resource waste, reduce the production capacity of all enterprises on the chain, and unsatisfactory customer relationships. So the evaluation of a SC is important for an enterprise to survive in a competitive market in a globalized business environment. Therefore, it is important to research the various methods, performance indicator systems, and technology for evaluating, monitoring, predicting, and optimizing the performance of a SC. A typical procedure of the performance evaluation (PE) of a SC is to use the established evaluation performance indicators, employ an analytical method, follow a given procedure, to carry out quantitatively or qualitatively comparative analysis to provide the objective and accurate evaluation of a SC performance in a selected operation period. Various research works have been carried out in proposing the performance indicator systems and methods for SC performance evaluations. But there are no widely accepted indicator systems that can be applied in practical SC performance evaluations due to the fact that the indicators in different systems have been defined without a common understanding of the meanings and the relationships between them, and they are nonlinear and very complicated

Sustainable Supply Chain Management

The book is a collection of studies dedicated to different perspectives of three dimensions or pillars of the sustainability of supply chain and supply chain management - economic, environmental, and social - and other aspects related to performance evaluation, optimization, and modelling of and for sustainable supply chain management, and thus presents another valuable contribution to sustainable development and sustainable way of life

Lunar materials processing system integration

The theme of this paper is that governmental resources will not permit the simultaneous development of all viable lunar materials processing (LMP) candidates. Choices will inevitably be made, based on the results of system integration trade studies comparing candidates to each other for high-leverage applications. It is in the best long-term interest of the LMP community to lead the selection process itself, quickly and practically. The paper is in five parts. The first part explains what systems integration means and why the specialized field of LMP needs this activity now. The second part defines the integration context for LMP -- by outlining potential lunar base functions, their interrelationships and constraints. The third part establishes perspective for prioritizing the development of LMP methods, by estimating realistic scope, scale, and timing of lunar operations. The fourth part describes the use of one type of analytical tool for gaining understanding of system interactions: the input/output model. A simple example solved with linear algebra is used to illustrate. The fifth and closing part identifies specific steps needed to refine the current ability to study lunar base system integration. Research specialists have a crucial role to play now in providing the data upon which this refinement process must be based

Data mining in manufacturing: a review based on the kind of knowledge

In modern manufacturing environments, vast amounts of data are collected in database management systems and data warehouses from all involved areas, including product and process design, assembly, materials planning, quality control, scheduling, maintenance, fault detection etc. Data mining has emerged as an important tool for knowledge acquisition from the manufacturing databases. This paper reviews the literature dealing with knowledge discovery and data mining applications in the broad domain of manufacturing with a special emphasis on the type of functions to be performed on the data. The major data mining functions to be performed include characterization and description, association, classification, prediction, clustering and evolution analysis. The papers reviewed have therefore been categorized in these five categories. It has been shown that there is a rapid growth in the application of data mining in the context of manufacturing processes and enterprises in the last 3 years. This review reveals the progressive applications and existing gaps identified in the context of data mining in manufacturing. A novel text mining approach has also been used on the abstracts and keywords of 150 papers to identify the research gaps and find the linkages between knowledge area, knowledge type and the applied data mining tools and techniques

Too little destruction, too little creation: a Schumpeterian diagnosis of the barriers to sustained growth in Ukraine

This paper examines problems of entry, exit and competition in Ukrainian product markets. It finds that Ukraine still has too little of all three, and that exit mechanisms, in particular, function poorly. Since impediments to entry and exit are largely the product of excessive and ill administered regulation, the paper also provides a systematic assessment of product-market regulation in Ukraine, using indicators developed by the OECD Economics Department. Finally, the paper presents the main findings of two empirical studies concerned with the potentially large benefits of opening up markets, via both increased competition and further privatisation, for productivity growth in Ukraine. * * * * * Cet article examine les questions de concurrence, d’entrée et de sortie des entreprises sur le marché des biens. Il montre que toutes trois demeurent insuffisantes en Ukraine, et que les mécanismes de sortie du marché, en particulier, fonctionnent de manière très imparfaite. Compte tenu du fait que les barrières à l’entrée et à la sortie sont largement le produit d’une réglementation excessive et mal appliquée, l’article donne une évaluation systématique du niveau de réglementation du marché des biens en Ukraine, en utilisant les indicateurs développés par le Département des affaires économiques. Enfin, l’article expose les principaux résultats de deux études empiriques évaluant les effets bénéfiques sur la croissance de la productivité de l’ouverture des marchés, d’une part par un accroissement de la concurrence et d’autre part par la poursuite des privatisations