Perspectives on Risk Analysis Modeling

Wed. 9 August 2023 1:00 pm

Speaker: Vicki Bier

I will discuss lessons learned from several modeling efforts over the last 15-20 years. From a project on emergency response (“Measuring and Achieving Equity in Multiperiod Emergency Material Allocation,” 2019), I will discuss the process of model formulation, and how we eventually arrived at the approach that we took. From a project on homeland security (“Optimal Resource Allocation for Defense of Targets Based on Differing Measures of Attractiveness,” 2008), I will discuss how a model originally designed to investigate one issue (defender uncertainty about attacker goals) ended up yielding surprising results about a completely different issue (cost-effectiveness of defenses). Finally, I will discuss how seemingly unrelated interests (research on Fukushima and teaching on engineering economics) came together to initiate a new project related to climate change (“Game-theoretic Modeling of Pre-disaster Relocation, 2020).