Risk Analysis Commons^™

Experimental And Numerical Investigation Of The Mechanism Of Blast Wave Transmission Through A Surrogate Head, Yi Hua, Praveen Akula, Linxia Gu, Jeff Berg, Carl A. Nelson

Mechanical & Materials Engineering Faculty Publications

This work is to develop an experiment-validated numerical model to elucidate the wave transmission mechanisms through a surrogate head under blast loading. Repeated shock tube tests were conducted on a surrogate head, i.e., water-filled polycarbonate shell. Surface strain on the skull simulant and pressure inside the brain simulant were recorded at multiple locations. A numerical model was developed to capture the shock wave propagation within the shock tube and the fluid-structure interaction between the shock wave and the surrogate head. The obtained numerical results were compared with the experimental measurements. The experiment-validated numerical model was then used to further ...

Adaptive Real-Time Seaport Security (Dynaportsec) - Integrated Portsec, Game Theory And Adaptive Adversary, Michael D. Orosz, Milind Tambe, Heather Rosoff

Current Research Project Synopses

The protection of seaports and other key physical infrastructures requires access to information and analytics to process that information into actionable intelligence. Considerable resources have been committed over the past several years to the collection and presentation of information as it relates to security and protecting the physical infrastructure from both man-made and natural calamities (e.g., “Virtual Port” at the Port of Long Beach). Although these systems greatly enhance the situational awareness capabilities of the human decision-maker, they lack the necessary analytics required to help decision-makers make sense of the collected information and determine how best to protect the ...

Economic Consequences Of Terrorism (3 Integrated Proposals), Adam Z. Rose

Current Research Project Synopses

This project will continue to enhance, broaden and transition the CREATE Economic Consequence Analysis Framework. I will continue to coordinate and perform research on integrating behavioral considerations and resilience into economic models of an economy impacted by a terrorist attack, and to maintain and upgrade CREATE’s suite of economic consequence analysis models. I will place a greater emphasis on transforming CREATE’s sophisticated/high performance computing CGE models to “reduced form” regression equations that can readily be used in- house by DHS staff. Also, I will begin a major thrust area on Enterprise Risk Management.

Synthesizing Instruction And Inoculation In Tailored Crisis Communication Messages Of Self-Efficacy, Tim Sellnow

Current Research Project Synopses

For too long, government agencies presumed that a single warning shared through standard media channels was sufficient for reaching all stakeholders during a crisis. This linear view fails to account for the diverse informational needs and cultural constraints within the broad audiences that are confronted by crises (Sellnow, Ulmer, Seeger, & Littlefield). As a means of addressing variance of audience needs, more recent scholarship has bridged instructional research with risk communication. The objective of this blended approach is to enhance an organization or agency’s capacity to generate messages that attend to the varying learning styles inherent in their audiences. Moreover, this line of research seeks to account for varying cultural preferences in crisis messages. Through ongoing message testing procedures, current research seeks to engage diverse audiences in a dialogue of message preferences prior to a crisis situation. One promising line of such instructional or informative communication focuses on inoculating or two-sided persuasion messages. These messages, delivered before a crisis and at the onset of a crisis recovery period, have the potential for diminishing loss of confidence in government agencies or in expediting the recovery of confidence for these agencies.

This project provides a framework for establishing communication strategies that, when implemented routinely prior to a crisis can reduce recovery time and enhance public resilience. Current research provides a detailed summary of effective crisis communication. Existing research, however has only recently begun to evaluate the effectiveness of communication strategies used prior to an acute crisis event. This project focuses on two highly relevant communication aspects in maintaining or rebuilding public confidence—accepting uncertainty and self-protection (Seeger, 2006; Sellnow, Ulmer, Seeger, & Littlefield, 2009). We selected these two aspects because of their salience in current literature and because of our presumption that they have relevance to post-crisis recovery. This project will build on previous research that has (a) successfully identified the importance of instructional messages in raising the perceived ...

Game Theory For Security: New Domains, New Challenges, Milind Tambe

Current Research Project Synopses

Our research focuses on effective allocation of limited security resources using game theory, accounting for the capability of adversaries to observe and exploit security schedules and data collected from multiple and repeated interaction with adversaries. We make use of attacker-defender Stackelberg games, and apply machine learning (to learn from interactions) and advanced algorithms using game-theoretic analysis to find optimal security policies for the defender to implement. These policies account for the different characteristics of the targets, the intelligent response of an adversary, and evolve over time with data.

It is critical to note that this research provides a significant advance ...

Spatially Layered Defenses Against Terrorism Using Decision And Risk Analysis, Detlof Von Winterfeldt

Current Research Project Synopses

Year 10 will be the beginning of a new research effort by the PI, which was motivated by his involvement in a National Academy study on evaluating the effectiveness of the Global Nuclear Detection Architecture (GNDA), a major effort of the Domestic Nuclear Detection Organization (DNDO). The GNDA employs a geographically layered defense strategy to prevent the theft and transportation of radiological and nuclear materials from a foreign source to a target in the US. The GNDA concept of a layered defense is similar to the concept of “defense in depth” promoted by the Nuclear Regulatory Agency for nuclear power ...

Using Risk Analysis To Assess The Value Of Improved Biosurveillance, Henry H. Willis

Current Research Project Synopses

The Department of Homeland Security, Office of Health Affairs (DHS-OHA) manages the National Biosurveillance Integration Center (NBIC) to enable early warning and shared situational awareness of bioterrorism and pandemic disease events. NBIC’s goal is to improve public response to these incidents by disseminating warning and recommended actions to the appropriate interagency partners in a timely fashion. Strategic Goal 2 of the NBIC Strategic Plan (DHS 2012) establishes a directive for DHS to:

Enhance federal government ability to rapidly identify, characterize, localize, and track a biological event of national concern by integrating and analyzing information relating to human health, animal ...

Modeling Attacker-Defender Games With Risk Preference, Jun Zhuang

Current Research Project Synopses

Traditional models of attacker-defender games generally assume that players are risk-neutral; i.e. they choose strategies that maximize their expected payoff or benefit. In practice, decision makers could be either risk seeking or risk averse, which has not been extensively studied in the attacker-defender game literature. For example, terrorists could have risk preferences (Yang et al. 2013); and Phillips (2013) even estimated the coefficient of relative risk-aversion for Al-Qaeda. Government could be risk averse: Standish (2002) argued that Western governments tend to be extremely risk-averse and constantly introduce disruptive risk-averse policies in many areas such as air travel security; Stewart ...

Analyzing Current And Future Catastrophic Risks From Emerging-Threat Technologies, Anthony Michael Barrett

Current Research Project Synopses

Events such as terrorist attacks and technological accidents can have a range of possible consequences. Potential events with extremely catastrophic consequences merit at least some risk analyses of greater scope, including longer time horizons, than for less-consequential events. Some rapidly developing technologies, such as in synthetic biology or critical infrastructure control systems, pose much greater risks of catastrophe in the future than they do today. These risks could be significantly reduced with enough foresight and advance warning. However, risk assessments that focus on what is possible in the relatively near term may overlook indicators of developments that would enable more-catastrophic ...

Calibration Of Expert Judgments In Counterterrorism Risk Assessment, Vicki M. Bier

Current Research Project Synopses

The purpose of this research is to develop an elicitation process to effectively assess important quantities, such as adversary intent and capabilities, target vulnerabilities, and countermeasure costs, by aggregating probabilistic judgments given by multiple experts. In particular, in the proposed method, a panel of subject-matter experts with differing backgrounds and interests would be asked to give estimates for the uncertain quantities of interest, as well as a set of “seed variables” whose values are verifiable using historical or anticipated near-future data. To adequately reflect the experts’ levels of confidence or uncertainty about each quantity of interest, they would be asked ...

Modeling The Dynamics Of Risk Perception And Fear: Examining Amplifying Mechanisms And Their Consequences, William J. Burns

Current Research Project Synopses

The purpose of this research is to improve our understanding of how perceived risk and negative emotions (e.g., fear, anger, sadness) might spread throughout a community and ripple to other parts of the nation following events differing in their risk signal. It specifically seeks to understand the public’s comparative response to a wide array of hazards. It also seeks to examine how the effects of risk communication messaging spread throughout a population offering protection from counterproductive attitudes and behaviors. This work significantly extends the system dynamics modeling done by Burns and Slovic, decision modeling by Rosoff et al ...

Individuals’ Responses To Near-Miss Events Over Time, Robin Dillon-Merrill

Current Research Project Synopses

This research team has been studying near-miss events and individuals’ reactions to near-miss events for several years as part of the CREATE effort. We have also been closely collaborating for several years with CREATE researchers: William Burns, Richard John, and Heather Rosoff. While this is a proposal submitted by Georgetown University, the work will be collaborative with our USC-CREATE colleagues, and we will be focused on developing insights and recommendations that can support the economic modeling efforts of CREATE. After most catastrophes, prior near-misses are identified. Near-misses occur when a negative event could have happened (for example, because of hazardous ...

Economy-Wide Modeling For Analysis Of Major Disruptive Events: Terrorism, Natural Disasters And Accidents, Peter B. Dixon

Current Research Project Synopses

The Centre of Policy Studies (CoPS) at Monash University has developed several versions of the USAGE model of the United States and applied them in collaboration with Adam Rose and other colleagues at CREATE in analyses of various terrorism/security-related events including port closures, disease epidemics and localized infrastructure damage. In 2011, CoPS created a bottom-up regional version of USAGE, called USAGE-R. This is the first bottom-up CGE model of the U.S. USAGE-R identifies the 50 states of the U.S. as 50 separate economies closely linked by interstate trade and interstate movement of people and capital. The initial ...

Proxy Decision Analysis For Adaptive Adversaries, Richard John, Heather Rosoff

Current Research Project Synopses

The threat of terrorism is of great concern in many countries and significant resources are being spent to deter terrorism and to mitigate the impacts of terrorist attacks. A better understanding of terrorist organizations and their evolving motivations and values over time is a critical component to decisions about allocating resources to minimize the impact of these organizations.

During past years, we have focused on developing and validating our pioneering approach to adversary preference modeling (APM) through the construction of random utility models of terrorist preferences. For year 10, we propose developing and testing a tool that serves as a ...

Systematic Exploration Of Public Response To Experimentally Manipulated Disaster Events (Terror And Non-Terror) Using Video-Based Scenario Simulation, Richard John, Heather Rosoff

Current Research Project Synopses

The objective of this research is to formulate a better understanding of how the public perceives the risk associated with disaster events (terrorist attacks and natural disasters) and the influence this has on behavioral decision making. More specifically, we propose to systematically explore perceived risk and avoidance behavior in response to the role of near-misses and false alarms, gain-loss framing, social media, and event attribution (could be a person – e.g., terrorist caused, or pilot saving the damaged plane, a system – e.g. security system, and so forth) both in the immediate and in the long-term. In the event of ...

Support For Dhs Risk Executive Steering Committee – Comprehensive Survey Of Analytic Guidelines, And Their Potential Applicability To Dhs Problems: General Scientific Analysis, Isaac Maya

Current Research Project Synopses

DHS plans to further develop guidance for standardizing analyses practices to facilitate high quality, data fidelity, utility of results, and appropriate consistency for the analyses performed by DHS Components and Offices. As a starting point for developing this guidance, DHS requires a survey and review of similar guidance used across the US government, as well as other sources (e.g., the National Academies and various professional societies).

Working Together For A Safer Tomorrow, Lloyd W. Mitchell Iii

Current Research Project Synopses

Working Together for A Safer Tomorrow attempts to reduce the economic impact of terror and disaster events in Tribally Inclusive Geographic Areas (TIGA). Introduced in Year 6, TIGA include both tribal communities and neighboring non-tribal communities and governments. Specifically, Working Together for A Safer Tomorrow, through a variety of inter-jurisdictional approaches, provides risk reduction educational and outreach opportunities for American Indian tribes, tribal corporations, tribal colleges, tribal gaming enterprises, Alaska Native villages, Alaska Native corporations, and adjacent governments and neighboring non-tribal communities. WTST activities work within TIGA by providing opportunities to work together as collaborators to identify risks, analyze data ...

Median Aggregation Of Distribution Functions, Stephen C. Hora, Benjamin R. Fransen, Natasha Hawkins, Irving Susel

Published Articles & Papers

When multiple redundant probabilistic judgments are obtained from subject matter experts, it is common practice to aggregate their differing views into a single probability or distribution. Although many methods have been proposed for mathematical aggregation, no single procedure has gained universal acceptance. The most widely used procedure is simple arithmetic averaging which has both desirable and undesirable properties. Here we propose an alternative for aggregating distribution functions that is based on the median cumulative probabilities at fixed values of the variable. It is shown that aggregating cumulative probabilities by medians is equivalent, under certain conditions, to aggregating quantiles. Moreover, the ...

An Analysis Of Safety Culture & Safety Training: Comparing The Impact Of Union, Non-Union, And Right To Work Construction Venues, Harry Miller Csp, Tara Hill, Kris Mason, John S. Gaal Edd

Online Journal for Workforce Education and Development

The construction industry is one of the most dangerous sectors of the US economy. As such, the safety attitudes and climate within small (residential) contracting firms may play a role in providing a safe culture and working environment. The intent of this practitioner-based research study is to compare and determine if there is a difference in safety practices—based on documented field inspections and their related original number of violations observed by OSHA—between union residential carpentry contractors in the St. Louis area and:

1) non-union residential carpentry contractors in the St. Louis area;

2) non-union residential carpentry contractors across ...

Stochastic Simulation Of Multiple-Station Ground Motions And Its Applications, Taojun Liu

University of Western Ontario - Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Approaches to simulate single- and multiple-component multiple-station ground motion records with target spatial coherency and spatial correlation structures are developed for scenario events in this study. To develop the approaches, spatial correlation of the Fourier amplitude spectrum for a random orientation and for two orthogonal directions is assessed, and empirical equations are suggested. Moreover, spatial coherency of ground motions for two orthogonal horizontal directions is estimated using actual records from seven seismic events. Empirical coherency function is suggested for the components of records in two orthogonal horizontal directions at single and multiple recording stations. It was also found that the ...