Keywords
Resilience; Critical Infrastructure; Multi-criteria Decision making; Deep Uncertainty
Location
Session B5: Managing Uncertainty
Start Date
11-7-2016 9:50 AM
End Date
11-7-2016 10:10 AM
Abstract
The flooding of La Guardia airport after Hurricane Sandy and other airports around the world due to extreme events and the associated high social and economic costs of disruption in such services have shifted the attention of decision-makers to assessing the resiliency of the critical infrastructure and considering the resiliency of the future development plans. However, future climate and socio-economic changes as the main drivers of uncertainty has made the risk and resilience assessment a challenging task for analysts and decision makers. The level of uncertainty of these drivers is known to be deep, since we haven’t yet undergone those changes and our knowledge is limited both in terms of modelling the concept of resiliency and quantifying the uncertainties. Aside from obvious uncertainty in mentioned drivers, there is also an inherent uncertainty about factors for measuring resilient infrastructure in a non-informed modelling context and identification of satisficing performance in a complex system that all together makes decision making a challenging task. In the literature, this situation is generally referred to as ‘deep uncertainty’.
Deep uncertainty is referred to circumstances under which analysts and experts do not know or decision makers cannot agree on: i) the appropriate models describing the systems’ development and transition, ii) probability distributions to represent level/type of uncertainty about key parameters in the model 3) how to value the desirability of alternative outcomes. Therefore, the need emerges to assist decision-makers not by providing them with optimal solution, but rather ranges of possible future outcomes under sets of plausible scenarios.
We present a specific case study of assessing uncertainty and resilience of the Fiumicino airport in Rome to assist decision-makers to make robust decision for future development/management plans. To this end, we identify a set of criteria that influence the resiliency of airports as well as their sources of uncertainties through experts’ and stakeholders’ elicitation, and employ computational tools to construct many uncertain multi-criteria decision analysis matrices to approximate the future performance of a set of development alternatives. The deficiencies of each development/management plan under different set of scenarios are determined and finally the robustness of each plausible solution considered is defined based on the above assessment.
Included in
Civil Engineering Commons, Data Storage Systems Commons, Environmental Engineering Commons, Hydraulic Engineering Commons, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering Commons
Uncertainty and resilience assessment of critical infrastructures: Application of MCDA to Fiumicino airport
Session B5: Managing Uncertainty
The flooding of La Guardia airport after Hurricane Sandy and other airports around the world due to extreme events and the associated high social and economic costs of disruption in such services have shifted the attention of decision-makers to assessing the resiliency of the critical infrastructure and considering the resiliency of the future development plans. However, future climate and socio-economic changes as the main drivers of uncertainty has made the risk and resilience assessment a challenging task for analysts and decision makers. The level of uncertainty of these drivers is known to be deep, since we haven’t yet undergone those changes and our knowledge is limited both in terms of modelling the concept of resiliency and quantifying the uncertainties. Aside from obvious uncertainty in mentioned drivers, there is also an inherent uncertainty about factors for measuring resilient infrastructure in a non-informed modelling context and identification of satisficing performance in a complex system that all together makes decision making a challenging task. In the literature, this situation is generally referred to as ‘deep uncertainty’.
Deep uncertainty is referred to circumstances under which analysts and experts do not know or decision makers cannot agree on: i) the appropriate models describing the systems’ development and transition, ii) probability distributions to represent level/type of uncertainty about key parameters in the model 3) how to value the desirability of alternative outcomes. Therefore, the need emerges to assist decision-makers not by providing them with optimal solution, but rather ranges of possible future outcomes under sets of plausible scenarios.
We present a specific case study of assessing uncertainty and resilience of the Fiumicino airport in Rome to assist decision-makers to make robust decision for future development/management plans. To this end, we identify a set of criteria that influence the resiliency of airports as well as their sources of uncertainties through experts’ and stakeholders’ elicitation, and employ computational tools to construct many uncertain multi-criteria decision analysis matrices to approximate the future performance of a set of development alternatives. The deficiencies of each development/management plan under different set of scenarios are determined and finally the robustness of each plausible solution considered is defined based on the above assessment.
