Suchergebnisse

AbstractPreparation for a disaster is not something that can be done by a single organization thus there is a need for coordination between them. Meetings and joint exercises are one means of coordination used by the emergency management community. Meetings and exercises take time, including transportation of personnel and arrangements, and time is money. With limited budgets, emergency managers need to make hard decisions about how their time is allocated. This paper describes a cost model for meeting analysis and discusses a case study that looks at the holistic time spent on meetings and exercises, by personnel, for the Hampton Roads Region of Virginia. A novel way is used to display this expenditure, e.g., it is shown in terms of monetary cost instead of temporal cost. This analysis highlighted some unexpected results, i.e., the small number of personnel involved in multiple working group meetings and high level of travel costs between the HR and the state capital, Richmond. This cost model approach may provide emergency managers with better mechanisms to show their meetings costs to senior leadership.

In the current economic climate, there is a requirement to justify all government spending by demonstrating the added-value that the expenditure gives. Modeling and Simulation (M&S) community is not exempted from this rule. This paper focuses on attempts to value standards and demonstrates that even though a myriad of different standards exist in the United States today, no one has "cracked the nut" on determining their value. This does not mean that standards are without value. The paper highlights their importance to our society and human development as a whole. Thus if we cannot give a value to M&S standards, we can at least minimize their cost. The paper concludes with some discussions on cost-savings in the development of standards though a study of organizational misbehavior.

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent establishment of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), considerable efforts have been made to estimate the risks of terrorism and the cost effectiveness of security policies to reduce these risks. DHS, industry, and the academic risk analysis communities have all invested heavily in the development of tools and approaches that can assist decisionmakers in effectively allocating limited resources across the vast array of potential investments that could mitigate risks from terrorism and other threats to the homeland. Decisionmakers demand models, analyses, and decision support that are useful for this task and based on the state of the art. Since terrorism risk analysis is new, no single method is likely to meet this challenge. In this article we explore a number of existing and potential approaches for terrorism risk analysis, focusing particularly on recent discussions regarding the applicability of probabilistic and decision analytic approaches to bioterrorism risks and the Bioterrorism Risk Assessment methodology used by the DHS and criticized by the National Academies and others.