Annett Anders

Research

Project Leader : Prof. Dr. M.H. Faber
Supervision : Prof. Dr. K. Nishijima, Prof. Dr. E.N. Chatzi
Project Partner : Schweizerischer Nationalfonds, Bern.

Building structures, infrastructure systems and industrial facilities are often built and operated on locations where natural hazard events may take place. Due to economic and technical reasons, these engineered systems are normally not designed to withstand the entire range of intensities of natural hazards. Instead, the possible decision to shut down operation and to evacuate people in the face of an emerging hazard is considered as an option in the overall strategy of risk management. Important examples where such strategies are presently utilized include refineries and fixed offshore platforms subject to tropical cyclones or tsunamis, but also urban habitats and public infrastructure subject to events such as storms, floods, tsunamis, wildfires or volcanic eruptions.

The decision to evacuate a densely populated area or to shut down an industrial facility is in itself associated with significant risks and usually with high costs. Thus decisions on emergency loss reduction activities (e.g. evacuation, shut-down) in the face of emerging hazards are critical. The relatively few but highly important decisions, which are to be taken by just a few persons within a small time frame subject to the uncertain and incomplete information prevailing such situations, must be well prepared.

Within this project the theoretical and methodical basis for supporting such decisions and mathematical algorithms are established to derive criteria for commencement of actions in consis-tency with the best available knowledge on the hazards and their potential consequences. Therein the formulation of the decision problem takes basis in the pre-posterior decision analysis [1], which can be related to a variant of the option pricing problem. Having formulated the decision problem, an algorithm is developed based on an option pricing algorithm, which has extensively been investigated in the field of financial economics. The practical use of the developed framework is shown by means of application examples.