SRA-E Lisbon 2017

Risk analysis enables policy decisions and allocations of resources across diverse topics. The temporal dimension and time horizons are critical to comparative risk analysis. Yet risk theory and methodology too often miss them. There has of course been progress quantifying the cost of recovery and time to recovery in resilience analysis. Where widely-used tools of project scheduling, including CPM and PERT, are able to incorporate probabilistic scheduling data, they are generally limited by vague estimates of most-likely, optimistic, and pessimistic task durations, or they neglect the time horizons entirely. While progress has been made to how the uncertainty in project scheduling is handled, there is still a key gap between the identification and assessment of risks affecting a project and the consequences of those risks on schedule. Risk managers must participate in scheduling (in acquisition, construction, testing, …) to address the variety of threats, including disruptive events associated with climate, markets, economics, technology, demographics, behaviors, and other emergent conditions. This presentation will develop theory and methodology that explicitly link disruptive emergent and future conditions with disruptions to project schedule. With the variety of uncertainties affecting scheduling in large-scale systems, a principled and repeatable consideration of emergent and future conditions related to these factors is needed. Several examples in infrastructure systems will be used to demonstrate scenario-based preference analysis with Gantt-type project scheduling, where the influence on task priority and durations is assessed across a selection of real-world emergent and future conditions. The examples show how a schedule can become resilient to particular disruptions, and how schedule resilience can be improved.