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Everyone makes decisions, but not everyone is a decision analyst. A decision analyst uses quantitative models and computational methods to formulate decision algorithms, assess decision performance, identify and evaluate options, determine trade-offs and risks, evaluate strategies for investigation, and so on. Info-Gap Decision Theory is written for decision analysts. The term "decision analyst" covers an extremely broad range of practitioners. Virtually all engineers involved in design (of buildings, machines, processes, etc.) or analysis (of safety, reliability, feasibility, etc.) are decision analysts, usually without calling themselves by this name. In addition to engineers, decision ana...
This book is a product of applying info-gap decision theory to policy formulation and evaluation in monetary economics and related domains. Info-gap theory has been applied to planning and decision problems in many areas, including engineering, biological conservation, project management, economics, medicine, homeland security, and more.
Innovations create both opportunities and dilemmas. They provide new and supposedly better opportunities, but — because of their newness — they are often more uncertain and potentially worse than existing options. Recent inventions and discoveries include new drugs, new energy sources, new foods, new manufacturing technologies, new toys and new pedagogical methods, new weapon systems, new home appliances and many other discoveries and inventions. Is it better to use or not to use a new and promising but unfamiliar and hence uncertain innovation? That dilemma faces just about everybody. The paradigm of the innovation dilemma characterizes many situations, even when a new technology is not...
Uncertainty influences the individual as well as society; so it is important to enhance our understanding of uncertainty. First of all, do we all agree on a unique definition of uncertainty in the natural and technological worlds? Secondly, how can we model uncertainty? Is it purely a state of mind, the lack of complete knowledge, or is it a phenomenon in its own right? What heuristic and mathematical models are available? What types of questions about uncertainty can be formulated? What questions can be realistically answered? Do scholars in diverse fields agree on these issues? These and other questions are addressed by 20 scholars from mechanical, civil, electrical, material, aerospace and ocean engineering, from applied mathematics, economics, industrial engineering and operations research, control theory, geodesy, systems science, and philosophy.
The aim of the book is to develop methodology for reliablity analysis which is particularly suited to the types of partial information characteristic of mechanical systems and structures. The book is designed as an upper-level undergraduate or first-year graduate text on robust reliability of mechanical systems. It will give the student or engineer a working knowledge of robust reliability which will enable him to analyse the reliability of mechanical systems. Each chapter is introduced with a brief conceptual survey of the main ideas, which are then developed through examples. Problems at the end of each chapter give the student the opportunity to strengthen and extend his or her understanding.
Five articles on recent developments in solids and structures comprise Volume 33 of the Advances in Applied Mechanics. Each chapter is a mix of field survey and new work. The topics include structural reliability, failure modes of composites and thin films, the mechanics of micro-structural evolution, and strain gradient plasticity.
The Symposium was aimed at the theoretical and numerical problems involved in modelling the dynamic response of structures which have uncertain properties due to variability in the manufacturing and assembly process, with automotive and aerospace structures forming prime examples. It is well known that the difficulty in predicting the response statistics of such structures is immense, due to the complexity of the structure, the large number of variables which might be uncertain, and the inevitable lack of data regarding the statistical distribution of these variables. The Symposium participants presented the latest thinking in this very active research area, and novel techniques were present...
Composed of the proceedings of a symposium on engineering geology and the environment, held in Athens in June, 1997, this work provides a survey of trends in engineering geology, and an interdisciplinary collaboration with hydrogeology, geochemistry, geomorphology, and soil and rock mechanics.