NPRE Alumnus Ron Knief and NPRE Assistant Professor Zahra Mohaghegh are organizing the embedded topical meeting, Risk Management for Complex Socio-Technical Systems, as part of the 2013 American Nuclear Society Winter meeting, to be held November 10-14 at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C.
Among the topical meeting's organizers, Knief, of Sandia National Laboratory, is General Chair, and Mohaghegh is Technical Program Chair.
Encouraged to submit papers by the summary submission deadline of June 12 are managers, safety professionals, risk analysts, researchers, and students around the world for discussions on multidisciplinary issues of risk, safety, reliability, and security of nuclear power and other complex systems.
RM4CSS will be the fifth in a series of meetings on risk management that were held in 1989, 1992, 2003, and 2009. According to Mohaghegh, "In order to preclude catastrophes, we need to quantitatively and more comprehensively integrate the interactions of social and technical contributing factors into risk models. The 2013 embedded topical meeting aims to facilitate addressing this challenge."
The cross-disciplinary sessions of the meeting will help broaden the technical perspective and facilitate communication between industry and regulatory organizations on the best approaches for effectively managing risk. More specifically, the conference aims to:
- Advance the state of knowledge in understanding risk management by analyzing both technical and social risk-contributing factors and the issues arising from their dynamic interactions.
- Provide a forum for creating a common risk management vocabulary for more effective communication among experts from diverse technical domains (e.g., engineering, mathematics, and physics) and social sciences (e.g., management, economics, psychology, organizational behavior, public policy).
- Discuss more formal integration of probabilistic and deterministic perspectives in risk, safety, reliability, and security analysis.
- Exchange risk management theories and techniques applied in nuclear power and other complex technologies and lay the foundations for defining unifying principles.
- Exchange ideas on how to narrow the gap between the science and practice of risk management.
- Evaluate the state-of-the-art on multi-dimensional risk management, considering diverse interrelated performance metrics (e.g., safety, cost, quality) of high-risk organizations.
- Explore more comprehensive risk acceptance criteria.
Selected full-length, peer-reviewed technical papers will be published in a post-meeting book. Summaries of the papers will also be published in the ANS Transactions. More details regarding abstract and full-paper submissions are available at: http://meetings.ans.org/riskmanagement/paper.html. Technical papers that can contribute to or bring new perspectives to any of the listed topics are invited. The meeting is also open to adding innovative special sessions.