The creation of autonomous decision makers to handle potentially hazardous or logistically complicated tasks is desirable for the purpose of reducing human labor and exposure to risk, and for increasing the general performance of autonomous systems in a wide variety of environments. However, traditional autonomous decision makers perform poorly when...
In this dissertation I explore the application of two novel modeling techniques for improving risk analysis of vector-borne disease and discuss their potential use in integrating environmental risk assessment that guides environmental and public health decisions. Techniques for analyzing risk have been considered inadequate due to a lack of understanding...
For safety critical complex systems, reliability and risk analysis are important design steps. Implementing these analyzes early in the design stage can reduce costs associated with redesign and provide important information on design viability. In the past several years, various research methods have been presented in the design community to...
The ultimate goal of large-scale design organizations are mainly to reduce costs and improve reliability and performance of systems while assessing how much risk (cost, schedule, scope) they can take and still remain competitive. To achieve this goal they need to develop tools to reach the most preferred design product...
Risk is a crucial decision factor besides traditional cost and performance during collaborative decision making in a distributed environment. Three main challenges exist: 1) stakeholders' different perspectives and/or diverse cultures can lead to inconsistent risk probability evaluations; 2) risk consequence is hard to be quantified in concrete unit; 3) risk...
Despite recent efforts to improve site safety, construction still accounts for a disproportionate injury and illness rate. According to the 2007 injury and illness data released by the National Safety Council, the construction industry has a fatality and disabling injury rate that is approximately three times higher than the all-industry...