Uncertainty-based decision-making in fire safety: Analyzing the alternatives

Large accidents throughout the 20th century marked the development of safety fields in engineering, devoted to better identify hazards, understand risks and properly manage them. As these fields evolved rather quickly and moved from a compliance to a risk-based approach, a significant delay in this transition was experienced in fire safety engineering (FSE). Devastating fires well into the 21st century and the restrictive nature of prescriptive codes signaled the need to transition towards a performance-based one. A performance-based approach provides flexibility and capitalizes on learning from accidental events and engineering disciplines such as process safety and FSE. This work provides an overview of the main alternatives to account for uncertainty in safety studies within the context of FSE, including traditional probabilistic analyses and emerging approaches such as strength of knowledge. A simple example is used to illustrate the impact of the uncertainty analysis on the results of a simple fire safety assessment. A structured evaluation is performed on each alternative to assess its ease of implementation and communication. The outcome is a compendium of advantages and disadvantages of the alternatives that constitute a toolbox for fire safety engineers to configure and use within their fire risk assessments. Process safety engineers are expected to gain an understanding of the similar and important challenges of FSE, being it directly relevant for process risk management and fire risk management in administrative buildings

Deliberation, Representation, Equity

"What can we learn about the development of public interaction in e-democracy from a drama delivered by mobile headphones to an audience standing around a shopping center in a Stockholm suburb? In democratic societies there is widespread acknowledgment of the need to incorporate citizens’ input in decision-making processes in more or less structured ways. But participatory decision making is balancing on the borders of inclusion, structure, precision and accuracy. To simply enable more participation will not yield enhanced democracy, and there is a clear need for more elaborated elicitation and decision analytical tools. This rigorous and thought-provoking volume draws on a stimulating variety of international case studies, from flood risk management in the Red River Delta of Vietnam, to the consideration of alternatives to gold mining in Roșia Montană in Transylvania, to the application of multi-criteria decision analysis in evaluating the impact of e-learning opportunities at Uganda's Makerere University. Editors Love Ekenberg (senior research scholar, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis [IIASA], Laxenburg, professor of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University), Karin Hansson (artist and research fellow, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University), Mats Danielson (vice president and professor of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University, affiliate researcher, IIASA) and Göran Cars (professor of Societal Planning and Environment, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm) draw innovative collaborations between mathematics, social science, and the arts. They develop new problem formulations and solutions, with the aim of carrying decisions from agenda setting and problem awareness through to feasible courses of action by setting objectives, alternative generation, consequence assessments, and trade-off clarifications. As a result, this book is important new reading for decision makers in government, public administration and urban planning, as well as students and researchers in the fields of participatory democracy, urban planning, social policy, communication design, participatory art, decision theory, risk analysis and computer and systems sciences.

Enhancing auditors fraud risk assessment by using throughput model as a decision aid

Following the recommendations in the current standards (e.g., Canadian Institute of chartered accountants, IAASB, AICPA (SAS No. 82 and 99)), along with the fraud triangle factors, in this work, a decomposition approach that employs SAS No. 99 factors is proposed, whereby these are decomposed in a Throughput model (TP) that serves as a decision aid. Auditors’ task of assessing fraud risk is a critical step that affects auditing planning and procedures, especially in the light of the recent major financial scandals. Authors of several prior studies suggest that a decision aid is an effective way to improve fraud risk assessment and make the best use of professional skepticism. Throughput model breaks up the decision making into four main dominant concepts: Perception (P), Information (I), Judgment (J), and Decision Choice (D). This decision aid is expected to be beneficial in the performance of comprehensive fraud risk assessments, and direct the auditor’s attention to wide classes of problems, especially those associated with the SAS No. 99/ ISA 240 requirements. This work is intended to test the decomposition of the categorized fraud risk factors into processes comprising the thinking model. In the present study, an experimental setting comprising of 42 auditors from different audit positions was adopted, and the model was tested using Partial Equation Modeling PLS. A comparison analysis was subsequently performed to compare auditors characterized by high and low skepticism in two fraud risk conditions (high and low). The results suggest that, when the SAS No. 99 factors were decomposed into the dominant concepts of the Throughput model, an effect was found between these dominant concepts. In addition, study findings reveal no significant differences between high and low skepticism when auditors follow the process of thinking model to assess fraud risk. These findings suggest that the requirement and recommendation under SAS No. 99 can effectively increase auditors’ sensitivity to high risk factors when the situation suggests high fraud risk

Deliberation, Representation, Equity: Research Approaches, Tools and Algorithms for Participatory Processes

In democratic societies there is widespread acknowledgment of the need to incorporate citizens’ input in decision-making processes in more or less structured ways. But participatory decision making is balancing on the borders of inclusion, structure, precision and accuracy. To simply enable more participation will not yield enhanced democracy, and there is a clear need for more elaborated elicitation and decision analytical tools. This rigorous and thought-provoking volume draws on a stimulating variety of international case studies, from flood risk management in the Red River Delta of Vietnam, to the consideration of alternatives to gold mining in Roșia Montană in Transylvania, to the application of multi-criteria decision analysis in evaluating the impact of e-learning opportunities at Uganda's Makerere University. This book is important new reading for decision makers in government, public administration and urban planning, as well as students and researchers in the fields of participatory democracy, urban planning, social policy, communication design, participatory art, decision theory, risk analysis and computer and systems sciences