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Port infrastructure and port operations are highly impacted by disruptive scenarios that stem from several different types of causes, including adverse weather events, economic crises, traffic congestion, and spikes in demand, among others. Port intermodal transportation systems are characterized by high complexity and uncertainty since they serve and impact multiple groups of stakeholders, including exporters, importers, operators, organizations, port workers, port authorities, residents, and others. The influences of the disruptive scenarios combined with the influences of possible conflicting interests among groups of stakeholders make significant impacts to port operations and planning programs. The innovation of this study is that it integrates two existing approaches to resilience analytics addressing the influences of scenarios and stakeholders to priorities: a stakeholder classification approach called stakeholder mapping, and an approach known as scenario-based preferences modeling. The framework that is developed in this paper finds the joint influences of disruptive scenarios and groups of stakeholders to disrupt the importance ranking of initiatives. The results emphasize that the most disruptive scenario to the multiple groups of stakeholders is s1, Traffic Congestion, the least disruptive scenario is s3, High Operation Cost, and the most robust and highly prioritized initiative is x18, Constructing the CIMT marine terminal.

There is increasing interest for agencies and industries to develop risk management processes for a wide variety of applications. Traditional risk management processes are motivated by controlling risk and avoiding losses. In contrast, other organizational processes focus on managing performance and value generation. In this paper we argue that risk management also adds an important contribution to these processes. However, this requires “proper” risk management extending beyond narrow safety oriented perspectives built on quantitative risk analysis and tolerability/acceptance criteria. There is need for a broad risk-performance framework with uncertainty being a main component of risk, and where knowledge and surprises are adequately reflected. In the paper we present and discuss such a framework. The framework is developed on the basis of an analysis of combinations of different risk management and performance management practices/policies. We show how the risk and performance management processes can be improved by proper risk conceptualization and a holistic thinking on how to develop and use goals in the organization, how to balance different concerns, and consider the need for agility – “sensitivity to operations”, as well as how to give weight to vulnerabilities, resilience, and antifragility.

Early in the lifecycle of a large-scale system, there are a variety of sources of enterprise risk to be identified and addressed as well as opportunity to improve enterprise resilience at a variety of geographic and temporal scales. This paper identifies the emergent and future conditions that most and least matter to enterprise risk management, demonstrating a risk analysis model that is grounded in latest theory of multi-perspective scenario-based preferences analysis. The effort extends theory and practice by suggesting a semi-quantitative method for iteration and applying a multi-perspective approach that tests the method in the new circumstances of an advanced communication system. It demonstrates how scenarios relatively influence the prioritization of initiatives for each key stakeholder and how to update the assessment for the monitoring of risk over months and years of the deployment. The approach is demonstrated for the deployment of a public safety wireless broadband network throughout the US and should be of interest to practitioners for building resilience in the deployment of complex technological systems.

A risk perspective contains the fundamental building blocks forming the understanding of risk, and can be based on scientific pillars and/or more informal conceptions and judgments of risk (risk perceptions). In this paper we discuss how the risk perspectives of various actors influence risk communication in relation to processes concerned with the assessment and management of risk. Based on a set of five defined risk perspectives, we investigate how the risk perspective influences the risk communication and how and to what extent differences in risk perspectives can cause barriers and problems in the communication. An important aim of the paper is to show how awareness about the different risk perspectives can assist in solving these problems. The paper concludes that the main barriers to good risk communication are not the lay people's poor understanding of the risks and the risk assessment tools, but the risk analysts who have not done their job in a professional way: established some scientific pillars for their work.

Agencies are increasingly following principles and guidelines for the coordination of risk assessment, risk management, and risk communication in large-scale programs. In particular, there is a challenge to comply with the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) memorandum “Updated Principles for Risk Analysis” among other guidelines. This paper demonstrates a systemic approach to achieve compliance of a risk program with administrative and organizational principles and guidelines for risk analysis. The paper suggests three canonical questions as the mission of such a program: (i) what sources of risks are to be managed by the program, (ii) how should multiple risk assessment, risk management, and risk communication activities be administered and coordinated, and what should be the basis for resource allocation to these activities, and (iii) how will the performance of the program be monitored and evaluated. The paper demonstrates a re-prioritization of policy initiatives of the program based on emergent and future conditions. The approach is useful to agencies implementing risk or safety organizational guidelines such as those of the OMB, the US Government Accountability Office, the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Department of Defense, and others. This paper will be of interest to risk managers; agencies; and risk and safety analysts engaged in the conception, implementation, and evaluation of risk or safety programs.

A new ISO guide on risk management terminology has recently been issued. The guide provides basic vocabulary for developing a common understanding of risk assessment and risk management concepts and terms among organisations and functions, and across different application areas. It provides the foundation of, for example, the ISO 31000 standard on risk management. The guide strongly influences the risk assessment and risk management field, and its quality is thus of utmost importance. In this paper a critical review of the guide is conducted. We argue that the guide fails in several ways in producing consistent and meaningful definitions of many of the key concepts covered. A main focus is placed on the risk concept, which is defined as the effect of uncertainty on objectives, but also many other definitions are looked into, including probability, vulnerability, hazard, risk identification and risk description. Examples are used to illustrate the problems and show how they can be rectified. Although the focus is on the ISO guide, the discussion is to a large extent general. The overall aim of the paper is to contribute to the further development of the area of risk assessment and risk management by strengthening its conceptual basis.

This article discusses some key principles and tools of safety management, with focus on risk analyses, risk interpretation, risk acceptance criteria and risk communication, as well as emergency preparedness. The starting point for the discussion is the experience from the activity on the Norwegian and UK continental shelves, and the implementation of new safety regulations in particular.

In the context of health, safety, and environmental decisions, the concept of risk involves value judgments that reflect much more than just the probability and consequences of the occurrence of an event. This article conceptualizes the act of defining and assessing risk as a game, in which the rules must be socially negotiated within the context of a specific problem. This contextualist view of risk provides insight into why technical approaches to risk management often fail with problems such as those involving radiation and chemicals, where scientific experts and the public disagree on the nature of the risks. It also highlights the need for allowing the interested and affected parties to define and play the game, thus emphasizing the importance of institutional, procedural, and societal processes in risk-management decisions.

Are risks social constructions of different societal actors that can be checked at best against standards of consistency, cohesion and internal conventions of deduction, but cannot claim any validity outside of the actor's logical framework? Or are technical estimates of risk representations of real hazards that can and will affect people as predicted by the statistical values, regardless of the beliefs or convictions of those who conduct the assessments? Which of the two sides one takes determines the legitimate function of risk perception for management purposes. The paper argues that both extremes, the constructivist and the realist perspective, miss the point, as risks are always mental representations of threats that are capable of claiming real losses. Over the last two decades, risk analysts have dealt with both sides of risk in an additive fashion. In times in which risk management has been under serious pressure to demonstrate effectiveness and cost-efficiency, the parallel approach of pleasing the technical elite and the public alike has lost legitimacy. In order to integrate risk assessment and perception, the paper analyses the strengths and weaknesses of each approach to risk analysis and highlights the potential contributions that the technical sciences and the social sciences can offer to risk management. Technical assessments provide the best estimate for judging the average probability of an adverse effect linked to an object or activity. First, public perception should govern the selection of criteria on which acceptability or tolerability are to be judged. Second, public input is needed to determine the trade-offs between criteria. Third, public preferences are needed to design resilient strategies for coping with remaining uncertainties. A public participation model is introduced that promises an integration of analytic knowledge and deliberative process involving those who will be affected by the respective risk.

The paper poses the question of whether the findings from social science research on risk perception could (or indeed should) find direct application in the domains of risk regulation and management. The problem this poses, of balancing and integrating the best available scientific judgements and evidence on the one hand with aspects of public risk evaluations on the other, is one of the most difficult questions to be faced by democratic governments and their regulators today. The paper argues that the findings from risk perception research do hold implications for the ways in which risk analysis and regulation should be done. Current social science research on risk perceptions is discussed together with existing UK regulatory policy, which allows, to a certain extent, contextual issues to be factored into risk tolerability decision making. The paper concludes by presenting a set of arguments both for and against the use of risk perceptions in policy. Brief conclusions are drawn regarding the conditions under which public preferences and values might be optimally elicited.