A Formalism for Management of Surprise or How I Learned to Design Dams and to Hate Systems-Analysis

After many centuries of designing engineering structures and systems within a deterministic framework, it has become fashionable to deal explicitly with uncertainty as an important component of planning and design strategies. Advances in applied statistical decision theory, coupled with the wide availability of computing machinery, are at the root of this transformation, and the recent literature is replete with studies of systems, large and small, under various conditions of uncertainty. This paper deals with a few rules for decision-making under a special category of uncertainty -- namely that associated with the occurrence of events which could not be foretold, let alone assigned a prior probability of realization within a given design horizon

A Proposal for a Decision Framework in the Skane Project

Water resources systems have been an important part of resources and environment related research at IIASA since its inception. As demands for water increase relative to supply, the intensity and efficiency of water resources management must be developed further. This in turn requires an increase in the degree of detail and sophistication of the analysis, including economic, social and environmental evaluation of water resources development alternatives aided by application of mathematical modeling techniques, to generate inputs for planning, design, and operational decisions. During the year of 1978 it was decided that parallel to the continuation of demand studies, an attempt would be made to integrate the results of our studies on water demands with water supply considerations. This new task was named "Regional Water Management" (Task 1, Resources and Environment Area) . It is concerned with the application of systems analysis techniques for planning and operational management of integrated regional water resources systems. This paper by Professor M.B. Fiering from Harvard University was drafted during his short visit to IIASA in March 1979. It contains a methodological proposal for analysis of regional water resources management. A model which couples alternative water demand patterns with the long-term availability of water is formulated

Mathematical Models for Screening

In this Report, another screening method in the design of water resource systems -- termed the Effective Capacity Method, or Method II -- is suggested. As in Method I, the Equivalent Reservoir Method (May 1973), this again uses the equivalent capacity concept, but here the equivalent capacities downstream of the entire system, termed effective capacities, are calculated for each potential reservoir individually. The cost-capacity functions for each site are modified to cost-effective capacity functions and the required system storage is allocated on the basis of these modified cost functions

Management and Standards for Perturbed Ecosystems

This paper introduces some new constructs for measuring the effectiveness of environmental standards and for formalizing the economic and social costs of meeting them. It emphasizes the element of recovery time (and of its manipulation) in ecosystem management, and thereby lays the mathematical foundation for further study of an Environmental Zoo (a physical entity in which living organisms are stocked to replenish depleted numbers in the field) and for evaluation of long-term exposure to low-level pollutants. The biological models presented here are taken directly from Holling, whose work distinguishes importantly between the properties of "stability" and "resilience", and who is continuing even now to apply these concepts to management of the spruce budworm in the province of New Brunswick. In place of conclusions, this paper identifies a few potentially fruitful programs for further work

Proposal for Studying an Environmental 'Zoo'

Two major features of ecosystems are (i) environmental pollution due to significant random accidents which disturb homeostasis, and (ii) the slow rate of recovery from such accidents. We should consider a "zoo" from which it would be feasible to re-seed damaged ecosystems with organisms of appropriate types, in numbers sufficient to trigger rapid recovery of homeostasis (or "ecolibrium"); the zoo would function as an ecological flywheel. We consider a water resource system

Project Status Report: Ecology and Environment Project

We present here the extended outline and copies of the illustrations used in the Status Report of the IIASA Ecology and Environment Project, presented at Schloss Laxenburg on 21 June 1974. Section 1., "General Review", is covered in the outline. Section 2., "A Case Study of Ecosystem Management", is the subject of a major monograph now in preparation. Section 3., on Selected Conceptual Developments, is in part documented in IIASA Research Reports RR-73-3 and RR-74-3