At this year's European Safety and Reliability Association (ESRA) annual meeting, ESREL 2013, Dr. Francis presented a discussion paper co-authored with GW EMSE Ph.D. student Behailu Bekera on the potential for using an entropy-weighted resilience metric for prioritizing risk mitigation investments under deep uncertainty.
The goal of this metric is to build upon tools such as info-gap decision theory, robust decision making approaches, scenario and portfolio analysis, and modeling to generate alternatives in order to develop resilience metrics that account for a couple ideas. First, we felt that if an event is very extreme, it would be quite difficult to prepare for that event whether or not the event was correctly predicted. Thus, resilience should be "discounted" by the extremeness of the event. Second, we felt that if an event is characterized by an uncertainty distribution obtained through expert judgment, the degree to which the experts disagree should also "discount" the resilience score. In our paper, the goal was to present the entropy-weighted metric we'd developed in our RESS article to the ESREL audience in order to engender some discussion about how to evaluate resilience under these conditions. This work was inspired by a talk Dr. Francis attended by Woody Epstein of Scandpower Japan in PSAM11/ESREL12 Helsinki.
The paper and short slides now appear on the publications page of the SEED research blog.