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LARGE SCALE DISASTER ANALYSIS AND MANAGEMENT: SYSTEM LEVEL STUDY ON AN INTEGRATED MODEL
Citation:
Shastri, Y., U. Diwekar, H. CABEZAS, AND N. M. LEWIS. LARGE SCALE DISASTER ANALYSIS AND MANAGEMENT: SYSTEM LEVEL STUDY ON AN INTEGRATED MODEL. Presented at AIChE The 2008 Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA, November 16 - 21, 2008.
Impact/Purpose:
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Description:
The increasing intensity and scale of human activity across the globe leading to severe depletion and deterioration of the Earth's natural resources has meant that sustainability has emerged as a new paradigm of analysis and management. Sustainability, conceptually defined by the Brundtland commission [1], exhibits many dimensions related to ecology, society, economics, technology and other system aspects. The goal of a sustainable policy, then, is to promote the structure and operation of the human component of a system (society, economy, technology, etc.) in such a manner as to reinforce the persistence of the structures and operation of the natural component (i.e., the ecosystem) [2]. This requires a basic understanding of the often nonlinear and non-intuitive relationships amongst different dimensions of sustainability. This basic understanding further includes a sense of the time scale of possible future events and the limits of what is and is not likely to be possible. With this understanding, systematic approaches can then be used to develop policy guidelines for the system. This work illustrates the value of such an approach by analyzing an integrated ecological-economic-social model that is a concise representation of the critical aspects of the real world [3]. The work models various scenarios that replicate possible catastrophic events and studies system wide implications of such events. Once those implications are understood, the work explores the development of policy guidelines to ensure system sustainability.