Search results for "Risk analysis"
showing 10 items of 375 documents
Offshore wind turbine operations and maintenance: A state-of-the-art review
2021
Abstract Operations and maintenance of offshore wind turbines (OWTs) play an important role in the development of offshore wind farms. Compared with operations, maintenance is a critical element in the levelized cost of energy, given the practical constraints imposed by offshore operations and the relatively high costs. The effects of maintenance on the life cycle of an offshore wind farm are highly complex and uncertain. The selection of maintenance strategies influences the overall efficiency, profit margin, safety, and sustainability of offshore wind farms. For an offshore wind project, after a maintenance strategy is selected, schedule planning will be considered, which is an optimizati…
Driver training interests of a Spanish sample of young drivers and its relationship with their self-assessment skills concerning risky driving behavi…
2013
Abstract Poor driving self-assessment skills (e.g., over-confidence) have been pointed out as an important explanatory factor behind young drivers’ accident involvement. This paper explores (1) what young drivers miss in their training as drivers in order to analyze whether an assessment of one's own driving skills plays an important role in their desire to improve as drivers, and (2) how these training interests are related to an estimate of their self-assessment skills concerning risky driving behavior. For this purpose, a study was conducted using a survey with a blocked sampling design of novice drivers. The survey solicited respondents’ self-report about (1) the contents of training co…
Novel Approaches to Prediction of a Future Number of Failures Based on Previous In-Service Inspections
2018
In this chapter, we present novel approaches to predictions of the number of failures that will be observed in a future inspection of a sample of units, based only on the results of the previous in-service inspections of the same sample. The failure-time of such units is modeled with a distribution from a two-parameter Weibull distribution. The different cases of parametric uncertainty are considered. The pivotal quantity averaging approach proposed here for constructing point prediction and simple prediction limits emphasizes pivotal quantities relevant for eliminating unknown parameters from the problems and represents a special case of the method of invariant embedding of sample statisti…
Evaluating Infrastructure Alternatives for Regional Water Supply Systems by Model-assisted Cost-benefit Analysis – A Case Study from Apulia, Italy
2014
The main challenge associated to regional water supply systems planning lies in understanding the best infrastructure alternatives to improve service given a certain configuration of the resources system. While cost-effectiveness assessments are still widespread in this type of analyses, they do not account for the fact that, especially in mature systems, service improvements tend to follow the law of marginal diminishing returns, so that a cost – benefit assessment should be preferable. Both costs and benefits can be organized into a cost-benefit analysis (CBA) framework. In a complex system, a model reproducing its topology and characteristics better describes the impacts of the alternati…
Risks of Concurrent Execution in E-Commerce Processes
2021
The development of ICT facilitates replacing the traditional buying and selling processes with e-commerce solutions. If several customers are served concurrently, e.g. at the same time, the processes can interference each other causing risks for both the buyer and the seller. The paper offers a method to identify purchase/sale risks in simultaneous multi-customer service processes. First, an exact model of buying-selling processes is created and the conditions for the correct process execution are formulated. Then an analysis of all the possible scenarios, including the concurrently executed buying-selling scenarios, is performed using a symbolic execution of process descriptions. The obtai…
Economical aspects, toxicity, and environmental fate of cerium oxide
2020
Abstract The present chapter reports some economical aspects of the cerium oxide market. Porter’s and PESTEL analyses have been used to evidence the strengths and weaknesses of the ceria market, along with the potentiality and opportunities within the years to come. The wide use of CeO2 nanoparticles in many applications requires to consider also issues related to their toxicity and environmental fate. In this regard, some contradictory reports in the relevant literature have been surveyed, thus highlighting the need for further and detailed investigation on these topics in order to propose effective strategies of risk assessment and environmental remediation.
Intelligent Management Systems for Energy Efficiency in Buildings: A Survey
2014
In recent years, reduction of energy consumption in buildings has increasingly gained interest among researchers mainly due to practical reasons, such as economic advantages and long-term environmental sustainability. Many solutions have been proposed in the literature to address this important issue from complementary perspectives, which are often hard to capture in a comprehensive manner. This survey article aims at providing a structured and unifying treatment of the existing literature on intelligent energy management systems in buildings, with a distinct focus on available architectures and methodology supporting a vision transcending the well-established smart home vision, in favor o…
A Simulation Software for the Evaluation of Vulnerabilities in Reputation Management Systems
2019
Multi-agent distributed systems are characterized by autonomous entities that interact with each other to provide, and/or request, different kinds of services. In several contexts, especially when a reward is offered according to the quality of service, individual agents (or coordinated groups) may act in a selfish way. To prevent such behaviours, distributed Reputation Management Systems (RMSs) provide every agent with the capability of computing the reputation of the others according to direct past interactions, as well as indirect opinions reported by their neighbourhood. This last point introduces a weakness on gossiped information that makes RMSs vulnerable to malicious agents’ intent …
A meta-cognitive architecture for planning in uncertain environments
2013
Abstract The behavior of an artificial agent performing in a natural environment is influenced by many different pressures and needs coming from both external world and internal factors, which sometimes drive the agent to reach conflicting goals. At the same time, the interaction between an artificial agent and the environment is deeply affected by uncertainty due to the imprecision in the description of the world, and the unpredictability of the effects of the agent’s actions. Such an agent needs meta-cognition in terms of both self-awareness and control. Self-awareness is related to the internal conditions that may possibly influence the completion of the task, while control is oriented t…
Understanding short- and long-term implications of “myopic” fleet maintenance policies: a system dynamics application to a city bus company
2010
Financial losses recorded in city bus companies often force managers to implement restructuring strategies aimed at improving business results. However, such decisions may not produce the expected consequences for a number of reasons. Both the internal and external environment in which such companies operate can make the design and implementation of long-term sustainable policies quite difficult. In fact, the result may be that decision makers introduce "effective" policies in a company subsystem, while ignoring the medium- and long-term implications of such decisions in the performance of the whole company. With the aim to detect the main causes underlying "myopic" fleet maintenance polici…