1,721,563 research outputs found
Indicator-based method to evaluate community resilience
Full text linkThe capacity of a community to react and resist to an emergency is strictly related to the proper functioning of its own infrastructure systems. A better understanding of critical infrastructure architecture is necessary for defining measures to achieve a better resilience against threats (natural and human threats) in an integrated manner. For this purpose, indicators are perceived as important instruments to measure the resilience of infrastructure systems. Many research activities have been focusing on developing reliable indicators that could be applied at different scales, but research on resilience, which is a multidimensional and transformative concept, is still in the early stages of development. Developing a comprehensive, standardized set of resilience indicators is obviously difficult for such a dynamic, constantly re-shaping and context-dependent concept,
Previous studies have highlighted the importance of conceptual frameworks to guide the selection of the indicators, so following the same trend this paper describes the procedure for selecting the proper indicators for community resilience within the PEOPLES framework (Cimellaro et. al 2009). PEOPLES is a holistic framework for defining and measuring disaster resilience of communities at various scales. It is divided into seven dimensions, and each dimension is further divided into several components. An integrated approach is presented that combines both quantitative and qualitative as well as outcome and process indicators, addressing a broad variety of issues such as the security, the geo-politics, the sociology, economy, etc. The methodology classifies the indicators’ location within the seven PEOPLES dimensions and provides a structure for creating a condensed list of indicators. Each indicator is linked to a measure allowing it to be quantified. The measures are expressed by serviceability functions rather than scalar values in order to allow a dynamic measurement of the indicators. Finally, the proposed indicators are weighted and then aggregated into a single serviceability function that describes the functionality of the community in time.
The developed methodology has been tested on the critical infrastructures of San Francisco, USA, in order to assess their level of resiliency. Results of the case study show that the methodology introduced to compute the resiliency allows decision makers to derive key-indicators of community resilience that are applicable on a higher level of societal resilience, across different contexts and hazard types (attacks, accidents, etc.). The present work contributes to this growing area of research as it provides a universal tool to quantitatively assess the resilience of communities at multiple scales
Resourcefulness quantification approach for resilient communities and countries
Full text linkAvailability of resources is one of the primary criteria for communities to attain a high resilience level during disaster events. This paper introduces a new approach to evaluate resourcefulness at the community and national scales. Resourcefulness is calculated using a proposed composite resourcefulness index, which is a combination of several resourcefulness indicators. To build the resourcefulness index, resourcefulness indicators representing the different aspects of resourcefulness are collected from renowned literary publications. Every indicator is assigned a measure to make it quantifiable. Time-history data for the measures are needed to perform the analysis. While these data could be obtained from different sources, acquiring a full set of data is quite challenging. Hence, to account for missing data, the Multiple Imputation (MI) and the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) data imputation methods are adopted. The data are then normalized, assigned weights, and aggregated to obtain the resourcefulness index. A case study is performed to demonstrate the applicability of the approach. The resourcefulness indexes of two countries, namely the United States and Italy, are evaluated. Results show that resourceful communities/countries are more resilient during disaster events as they have more tools to come up with solutions. It is also shown that knowing the current resourcefulness level helps in better identifying what aspects should be improved.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Integral Design & Managemen
Probabilistic framework to evaluate the resilience of engineering systems using Bayesian and dynamic Bayesian networks
Full text linkResilience indicators are a convenient tool to assess the resilience of engineering systems. They are often used in preliminary designs or in the assessment of complex systems. This paper introduces a novel approach to assess the time-dependent resilience of engineering systems using resilience indicators. A Bayesian network (BN) approach is employed to handle the relationships among the indicators. BN is known for its capability of handling causal dependencies between different variables in probabilistic terms. However, the use of BN is limited to static systems that are in a state of equilibrium. Being at equilibrium is often not the case because most engineering systems are dynamic in nature as their performance fluctuates with time, especially after disturbing events (e.g. natural disasters). Therefore, the temporal dimension is tackled in this work using the Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN). DBN extends the classical BN by adding the time dimension. It permits the interaction among variables at different time steps. It can be used to track the evolution of a system's performance given an evidence recorded at a previous time step. This allows predicting the resilience state of a system given its initial condition. A mathematical probabilistic framework based on the DBN is developed to model the resilience of dynamic engineering systems. Two illustrative examples are presented in the paper to demonstrate the applicability of the introduced framework. One example evaluates the resilience of Brazil. The other one evaluates the resilience of a transportation system.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Integral Design & Managemen
Measuring and improving community resilience: A fuzzy logic approach
Full text linkDue to the increasing frequency of natural and man-made disasters, the scientific community has paid considerable attention to the concept of resilience engineering. On the other hand, authorities and decision-makers have been focusing their efforts on developing strategies that can help increase community resilience to different types of extreme events. Since it is often impossible to prevent every risk, the focus is on adapting and managing risks in ways that minimize impacts to communities (e.g., humans and other systems). Several resilience strategies have been proposed in the literature to reduce disaster risk and improve community resilience. Generally, resilience assessment is challenging due to uncertainty and the unavailability of data necessary for the estimation process. This paper proposes a Fuzzy Logic method for quantifying community resilience. The methodology is based on the PEOPLES framework, an indicator-based hierarchical framework that defines all aspects of a community. A fuzzy-based approach is implemented to quantify the PEOPLES indicators using descriptive knowledge instead of complex data, accounting for the uncertainties involved in the analysis. To demonstrate the applicability of the methodology, three cases with different levels of data availability are performed to obtain a resilience curve and resilience index of two out of seven dimensions of the PEOPLES framework. When numerical data does not exist, descriptive data based on expert knowledge is used as input. Results show that the proposed methodology can cope with both numerical and descriptive input data with different uncertainty levels providing good estimates of resilience. The methodology can be used as a decision-support tool to assist decision-makers and stakeholders in assessing and improving their communities' resilience for future events, focusing on specific indicators that suffer from resilience deficiencies and need improvements.System Engineerin
Closure to "new resilience index for urban water distribution networks" by G. P. Cimellaro, A. Tinebra, C. Renschler, and M. Fragiadakis
Full text linkLe Fondazioni bancarie fra pubblico e privato
No full textLa ricostruzione di molti dei problemi che riguardano le Fondazioni di origine bancaria e la stessa individuazione del regime giuridico ad esse applicabile si collega alla peculiarità della loro storia che, in virtù di un susseguirsi di interventi legislativi e giurisprudenziali, ne vede ora definitivamente affermata la natura privata. Tuttavia, in considerazione delle loro finalità sociali, se non pubblicistiche, l'analisi giuridica di questi istituti coinvolge necessariamente la necessità di valutare in quale ambito e con quale intensità possano ad essi applicarsi regole e discipline di diritto pubblico.
Il lavoro, alla luce della nuova prospettiva, disegnata in particolare dalla Corte costituzionale, riesamina la problematica della configurabilità delle Fondazioni di origine bancaria quali organismi di diritto pubblico. Considerata la funzionalizzazione della loro attività a fini di interesse generale, affronta, inoltre, la questione della perdurante applicabilità alle medesime dei principi della legge sul procedimento amministrativo e, con riferimento alla pretesa alla legittimità dell'attività di erogazione, analizza infine le possibilità di tutela dei potenziali beneficiari
Un'altra decisione nel cammino verso l'individuazione degli organismi di diritto pubblico
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