#TWIST 24 June 2016

seedJune 24, 2016Leave a comment

This week in Infrastructure Systems:

Please join ASCE Government Relations and membership in urging Congress to pass the Water Resources Development Act. ASCE reminds us that "Passing the Water Resources Development Act of 2016 (WRDA) is one of the top federal priorities for ASCE this year. While the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW) and House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee (T&I) have passed bills out of committee, neither Chamber has scheduled a floor vote." Please visit this link to complete a pre-drafted letter addressed to your representatives, and let them know how important WRDA is.
If you know a young engineer, please share these 7 pieces of advice with them, even if it is unsolicited. In the week after of Father's Day, it is good to reflect on advice from an engineer dad to his engineer son.
The EPA has promoted several tools that can be used in order to assist water and wastewater utilities in improving resilience to climate change. The Climate Ready Water Utilities Initiative helps forward thinking utilities determine how to deal with potential water shortages, increases in river levels, or increased incidence of extreme precipitation events. Three tools in particular, the Climate Readiness Evaluation Tool (CREAT), an adaptation information exchange, and an adaptation workshop planner will help utilities address the challenges they and their stakeholders will face.
Chemicals and advanced manufacturing will be affected by a new rule promulgated in the European Union. The European commission has launched the first regulation aimed at classifying and banning endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs). This rule attempts an ambitious objective: guarding against unforeseen consequences of EDC exposure even though there are major information gaps in the assessment of EDC hazards and human exposures. The Guardian provides a peek into some of the accomplishments and controversies of the European commission’s new rule.
The New York Times has done an excellent feature story on the new Panama Canal. Their interactive feature explores the risky project, and is a fascinating read for anyone interested in infrastructure. The description of the financial, cultural, technical, and economic challenges facing the Canal Authority and the project consortium is absolutely riveting. Folks living in coastal cities like I do stand to see substantial economic and technological benefits from the increased use of Panamax vessels in international shipping.
Big week for Ohio off the basketball court too, as Columbus, OH, USA is awarded $140 million, including a $50 million smart cities grant from the Department of Transportation, to upgrade their transportation network. How can your city become smarter?

#TWIST 17 June 2016

seedJune 17, 2016June 17, 2016Leave a comment

This week in Infrastructure Systems:

On 21-22 June here in Washington, DC, the National Academies will host a Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable (GUIRR) on Smart Cities. This looks to be an exciting event, with dynamic speakers including Carlo Ratti, Gordon England, Sokwoo Rhee, and many others. In the words of the National Academies...

This meeting will explore the common characteristics of smart communities, the role of connectedness and sustainability in developing smart communities, and the partnerships between governments, universities, and industry that are integral to advancing smart community development.

Pennsylvania has been out in front thinking about how to deal with wastewater produced by hydraulic fracturing. Today, their efforts were vindicated as EPA has moved to ban the disposal of produced water at public wastewater treatment plants. The contaminants routinely found in such produced waters, including heavy metals, high concentrations of dissolved solids, and chemical additives of unknown composition often cannot be removed by the treatment technologies employed by public systems. EPA's rule, the Pretreatment Standards for the Oil and Gas Extraction Point Source Category, will force some innovative thinking around the treatment of hydraulic fracturing wastes.
This week, the FCC determined that broadband internet should be regulated as a public utility. This will set up some exciting discussions among all stakeholders involved, as the US has been engaged in a discussion over net neutrality, broadband as a critical infrastructure, and the appropriate levels of public involvement in provision of broadband services.
Finally, GovTech asks the question: "Should CFOs run American Infrastructure?" Closely related is the thought: "How to stop the endless deferred maintenance cycle." It is often difficult for local politicians to invest the requisite funds to maintaining infrastructure assets, when it can often be more sexy to break ground on a brand new project. What changes need to happen in order for us to take the full life-cycle cost of an infrastructure asset into account, when that asset can last upwards of 50 years or more? Emerging approaches to infrastructure investment include public-private partnerships (P3s), value for money (VFM), and performance-based infrastructure (PBI). All of these start at the local level, and involve a full-cost approach to assessing the value of infrastructure projects. What do you think? What kind of changes are in order?

#TWIST-This Week in Infrastructure Systems

seedJune 10, 2016Leave a comment

I thought it might be a good idea to start sharing some of the things I read or hear across several great news sources on infrastructure systems. We all are affected by our infrastructure systems daily. With this in mind, we are starting a series called #TWIST-This Week in Infrastructure Systems. Today, I'm sharing four items from my week's reading for our first issue.

The Guardian asks "Is City Living Bad for Your Health?" This is a crucial question that deserves our attention, as our society is becoming increasingly urban and resource intensive. As we come together in greater geographic densities, we have the opportunity to improve our economic and environmental efficiency--but we have to make sure we don't do so at the expense of our health.
Govtech.com shows us how we can use robots to perform sewer structural monitoring. Arlington, TX, USA recently has developed a 42-inch robot using technology created by Red Zone Robotics to revolutionize the way they conduct sewer system to scan large-diameter concrete sewer pipes--the pipes that would lead to most catastrophic failures--and evaluate data on their system.
ASME is encouraging engineers to engage with the literature of their profession. They have a list of 3 books all engineers should read, including Petroski's "To Engineer is Human", Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", and Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things." These could provide some great ideas for engineers not only to engage one another across disciplines, but also to engage the general public in issues engineers face when designing systems or technologies.
While we in DC are suffering through the long-overdue WMATA SafeTracks initiative, NYC has recently released their Mobility Report. In their own words, the NYC Mobility Report "...presents data on the primary drivers of transportation demand in New York City— population, tourism, employment—side-by-side with transportation indicators related to vehicle use and transit ridership dating back to 1910..." Their goal is to examine how they have relied on their transportation systems to achieve such vibrancy, and to determine what is necessary to keep moving forward.

Lautenberg Act: Bringing American Chemicals Regulation into the 21st Century

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Today, a massive achievement in chemicals reform was accomplished on Capitol Hill. The Senate voted to overhaul the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) of 1976. The original act was written in the '70s when environmental problems were outrageous and fixes were obvious, the interpretation of risk information was different, the acceptability of testing practices was not questioned, and the process for evaluating chemicals was seen as legitimate.

Needless to say, none of these things are true in 2016.

In fact, overhaul of TSCA was seen as critical as early as the late 1980s. There are tens of thousands of chemicals in commerce, yet the evaluation process is so slow that only a handful are evaluated each year. Yes, you read that correctly. In an age where we now have computational toxicology, structure-activity relationships, and other approaches to predictive toxicology that can streamline the evaluation process and use fewer animals to do it at less expense, we evaluate only a handful of chemicals each year.

Part of this is due to the process involved. In the United States, we protect private property stringently. As a result, we tend to have high barriers to intervention in commercial affairs. Part of the way this plays out in chemicals regulation is placing the burden of proof for the need for chemical information collection and evaluation on the government. This can extend the timeline and increase the cost of chemical evaluation.

Moreover, we are now aware that chemicals can interact unpredictably in human and environmental systems (read: bodies or organisms). In addition, where in the 70s the general public believed there was such a thing as a level at which no health effects might occur, the general public now acknowledges there is no level of exposure at which zero health effects can occur.

The point of all this being that, as complex as chemical evaluation was in the '70s, it is more complex now. At the same time, we have much more powerful tools. We need the impetus to investigate the use and interpretation of these tools. We need to bring TSCA into the 21st century.

There has been a lot of attention given to this issue this week. On Twitter, search the hashtag #FixTSCA or visit www.fixtsca.org to see a broad array of voices on this topic. The New York Times has hailed Congressional action on TSCA. And on the Diane Rehm show this morning, the dean of the GW Milken School of Public Health, Lynn Goldman, who has been involved in the fight to reform TSCA for over 20 years, helped to explain the significance of this important achievement [podcast here].

DRAFT SRA Risk Glossary Available for Comment!

seedJanuary 29, 2015Leave a comment

There is an exciting new opportunity to affect the field of risk analysis. The Society for Risk Analysis [SRA] Council, and the SRA Specialty Group for Foundations in Risk Analysis has constructed a new glossary aimed at developing an authoritative dictionary of terms used in risk analysis. Comments are currently being welcomed as the SRA Council is well aware that it may be difficult to agree on just one set of definitions. The description found on the SRA website is as follows:

The Council of the Society of Risk Analysis (SRA) has initiated a work on preparing a new SRA glossary.

A committee has been established to develop the glossary, and a draft version was presented to the SRA Council December 7, 2014. The response was very positive and a plan for how to proceed was approved. The objective is to have a final version ready for approval by the SRA Council in their June 2015 meeting. The committee welcomes comments and suggestions to the draft glossary to further improve the definition texts and incorporate alternative views and perspectives; please send them to terje.aven@uis.no. Deadline 28 February 2015.

To access the draft glossary press here.

Terje Aven
Leader of the Committee

Please be sure to provide your comments by 28 February 2015.

Herb Simon on Complexity and Planning

seedMay 13, 2014Leave a comment

Herb Simon's book, The Sciences of the Artificial, has instantly become one of the more indispensable books on my shelf. Even though I spent five years across the quad from a building with his name on it, I never really learned what he did or why his work was so important. So it is with a bit of embarrassment that I admit this book was an unexpected pleasure.

I stumbled across Simon's book as an accident. One of my students recommended we read Ethiraj and Levinthal's "Modularity and Innovation in Complex Systems" to inform our discussion about information sharing in support of infrastructure system emergency preparedness. One of their references to "The Architecture of Complexity" seemed interesting, and I wanted to learn more about system architecture so I could understand what one of my newest colleagues, David Broniatowski, was saying when he discussed the role of architecture in system flexibility and controllability. So I set out in search of "Architecture of Complexity," and the librarian instead pointed me to The Sciences of the Artificial. What a blessing!

I truly want you to read the book, so I won't say too much. For me, my most cherished insight from Simon was the following:

A man [An ant], viewed as a behaving system, is quite simple. The apparent complexity of his behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which he [it] finds himself [itself].

To me, the simplicity and elegance of this hypothesis characterizes the entire book. Although we may disagree on the specific mechanisms, or on the plausibility of this hypothesis, its influence on the practice of engineering and policy design cannot be doubted. I also see the practical results of exploration of this hypothesis everywhere I look in research and technical literature. This hypothesis and many other insights (e.g., satisficing, hierarchical organization of complex systems, valuing the search vs. valuing the outcome, etc.) immediately resonated with my experiences and pulled me all the way through the book.

Because I was trained as a civil engineer, it has taken a decade after my undergraduate to encounter Simon's work. I believe I can say that it has been worth the wait.

New SEED paper reporting on use of Bayesian Networks to model water pipe breaks!

seedMay 13, 2014Leave a comment

We have recently had our article, "Bayesian belief networks for predicting drinking water distribution system pipe breaks," accepted for publication in Reliability Engineering and System Safety. It is now available online from the publisher.

This was one of the most rewarding papers I've written, because it allowed me to learn so much more about one of my favorite modeling techniques, the Bayesian Network. Specifically, the challenge of this paper is in learning the network from the data, instead of taking the more popular approach of assuming a network structure a priori. I am still not finished investigating the use of Bayesian Networks in infrastructure data problems, but I'm excited about this first step.

The abstract is quoted below:

In this paper, we use Bayesian Belief Networks (BBNs) to construct a knowledge model for pipe breaks in a water zone. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to model drinking water distribution system pipe breaks using BBNs. Development of expert systems such as BBNs for analyzing drinking water distribution system data is not only important for pipe break prediction, but is also a first step in preventing water loss and water quality deterioration through the application of machine learning techniques to facilitate data-based distribution system monitoring and asset management. Due to the difficulties in collecting, preparing, and managing drinking water distribution system data, most pipe break models can be classified as “statistical-physical” or “hypothesis-generating.” We develop the BBN with the hope of contributing to the “hypothesis-generating” class of models, while demonstrating the possibility that BBNs might also be used as “statistical-physical” models. Our model is learned from pipe breaks and covariate data from a mid-Atlantic United States (U.S.) drinking water distribution system network. BBN models are learned using a constraint-based method, a score-based method, and a hybrid method. Model evaluation is based on log-likelihood scoring. Sensitivity analysis using mutual information criterion is also reported. While our results indicate general agreement with prior results reported in pipe break modeling studies, they also suggest that it may be difficult to select among model alternatives. This model uncertainty may mean that more research is needed for understanding whether additional pipe break risk factors beyond age, break history, pipe material, and pipe diameter might be important for asset management planning.

A Theological View on Risk and Risk Taking

seedMay 1, 2014Leave a comment

When teaching about risk and uncertainty analysis, one of the questions I often have is "How do my students' worldviews influence their conceptualization of risk?" I thought one area to search in order to answer this question is the theological literature about risk. I felt that some of these scholars might have something to say about this problem, and I'd recently come across an edited volume by Niels Henrik Gregersen titled Information and the Nature of Reality, so I figured I might be able to start with him based on what I'd seen from those discussions.

Among the first articles I read was an article by Gregersen called "Risk and Religion: Toward a Theology of Risk Taking." [Gregersen (2003), Zygon 38(2), p. 355-376] I am not quite finished with the article, but it seems the he is suggesting changing the traditional approach to risk (i.e., Risk = Probability x Consequence) to explicitly indicate that risk is difficult to calculate since it includes both our evaluation of the dangers, and the compound events composed by our responses to external events that can occur (i.e., Risk = int(Pr[outcome|our decisions, external event]Pr[external event]) x Evaluation[outcome|our decisions, external event]... or something like this). His discussion then seems to indicate that since the risks we are faced with are increasingly related to our decisions and not the consequences of natural events alone, that is, second-order versus first-order risks, in the long-run a risk-welcoming attitude may be more virtuous than a risk-averse one.

While reading, I was impressed upon by so many ideas I wanted to immediately share with close friends who are familiar with my professional interest in risk. I would read a paragraph, then imagine my friend's response to it. Read another, imagine the response. This article had so much that I could easily see coming up in discussions around the dinner table or at the coffee shop. Ultimately, I felt compelled to stop and share with you all this excerpt publicly:

Risk and fate cannot be pitted against each another, because the former always takes place within the framework of the latter. Expressed in theological terms, the world is created by a benevolent God in such a manner that it invites a risk-taking attitude and rewards it in the long term. Risk taking is a nonzero-sum game. The gifts of risk taking are overall greater than the potential damages, and by risking one’s life one does not take anything away from others; the risk taker explores new territories rather than exploiting the domains of the neighbor. (p. 368)

It is possible that you reading this now do not share my theistic worldview. Nonetheless, we must remember that risk taking is a fundamental and worthy component of our human enterprise. I spend almost all my time studying, evaluating, and developing methods to reduce or plan for risks we want to avoid. Most of the time, these risks are imposed on others by the decisions of a third party. Sometimes, these risks are framed as questions of reliability in complex systems. But for me, they are rarely framed as venture.

For me, I think the nature of the risks we often employ professional advice to explore makes us likely to forget this. Risk can, and probably should, only be considered in the context of venture-a great gain deliberately pursued in view of an examined possibility of adverse consequences. While reading this article as part of a larger interest in understanding how worldview frames and addresses risk, I can't help feeling a bit uncomfortable about this statement. I agree with it 100%. Yet I feel we don't accept its implications. I think our public interest in risks associated with complex systems makes this challenging, and I don't have any good answers.

Towards Disaster Resilient Cities: Characterizing Resilience of Infrastructure w/Expert Judgment

seedNovember 19, 2013Leave a comment

Today, I'm pleased to present a guest entry from SEED Ph.D. student, Vikram Rao. This article, an advance from Risk Analysis by Stephanie Chang and colleagues, is an exciting introduction to the use of expert judgment to investigate infrastructure resilience. Traditionally, expert elicitation is used to evaluate probabilities to assess the vulnerability of a critical system to outages of feeder systems or incidence of extreme exogenous events. In this article, Chang and colleagues emphasize the use of expert elicitation to assess such resilience quantities as time to recover and disruption to system services over time. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did, and thank you Vikram for your insights...

This article examines resilience of infrastructure systems using expert judgments. This is of interest since disasters such as earthquakes can cause multiple failures of infrastructure systems since they are interdependent. The approach here is to characterize system resilience, understand the relationships between interdependent systems in the context of resilience, and understand ways to improve resilience, which is of interest to risk managers. Many infrastructure systems are considered here, including water, electricity, and healthcare.

The researchers use expert judgments in a non-probabilistic approach. One goal is to elicit the service disruption levels, given as degree of impact/degree of extent, for numerous sectors. Interdependency diagrams show the dependencies between systems and provide clues as to the cascading nature of disaster events. For example, healthcare is heavily dependent on water, which tells health risk managers that it is advisable to have alternate water sources available in the event of emergency. One thing I find interesting is that there is no agreement on the extent of infrastructure reliance on water. Some studies claim that water is needed for other infrastructures to function, others do not. So the importance of water in infrastructure resilience remains to be seen.

When discussing the results, the authors bring up the fact that the representatives (experts) revise their judgments in the face of new information. Experts realize that the importance of a system is greater than originally believed, or that interdependencies exist that they had not considered. Since infrastructure systems are so interdependent and functional systems are critical for human well-being, the sharing of information between infrastructure systems is needed going forward.

One area I would like to see additional research is to explore resilience in water distribution systems, particularly looking at costs associated with disaster recovery and time to restore water distribution functionality. We could use expert judgments to examine the quantitative nature of water system resilience, for example eliciting the cumulative distribution of water functionality as a function of time (e.g. 25% water functionality restored after 1 week, 75% after 3 weeks). This is of course valuable to risk managers who are seeking to understand the nature of water system functionality in the wake of a disaster.

New SEED paper on sustainability definition accepted to JMCDA

seedOctober 21, 2013Leave a comment

Today we received word that a SEED paper co authored by Dr. Francis and Cassandra Reyes-Jones has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Multi Criteria Decision Analysis [Francis, R.A. and Reyes-Jones, C. (2014). “Decision-Analytic Approach for Water Sustainability Definition: A Higher Education Case Study."]. In collaboration with the GW Office of Sustainability, we used a decision analytic process to demonstrate an approach to articulating a sustainability "definition" using an objective-value hierarchy and elicited value functions. The author version will be posted soon for your interest!