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| Titel |
Divide and Conquer: An Approach for Interdisciplinary Risk Assessment and Decision Making under Uncertainty for Groundwater-Related Diseases |
| VerfasserIn |
Diogo Bolster, Felipe de Barros, Xavier Sanchez-Vila, Wolfgang Nowak |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2011
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 13 (2011) |
| Datensatznummer |
250056560
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| Zusammenfassung |
| Assessing the potential risk of hydro(geo)logical supply systems to
human population is an interdisciplinary field. It relies on the
expertise in fields as distant as hydrogeology, medicine, or
anthropology, and needs powerful translation concepts to provide
decision support and policy making. Reliable health risk estimates
need to account for the uncertainties in hydrological, physiological
and human behavioral parameters. We propose the use of fault trees to
address the task of probabilistic risk analysis (PRA) and to support
related management decisions. Fault trees allow decomposing the
assessment of health risk into individual manageable modules, thus
tackling a complex system by a structural “Divide and Conquer”
approach. The complexity within each module can be chosen individually
according to data availability, parsimony, relative importance and
stage of analysis. The separation in modules allows for a true inter-
and multi-disciplinary approach. This presentation highlights the
three novel features of our work: (1) we define failure in terms of
risk being above a threshold value, whereas previous studies used
auxiliary events such as exceedance of critical concentration levels,
(2) we plot an integrated fault tree that handles uncertainty in both
hydrological and health components in a unified way, and (3) we
introduce a new form of stochastic fault tree that allows to weaken
the assumption of independent subsystems that is required by a
classical fault tree approach. We illustrate our concept in a simple
groundwater-related setting. |
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