Risk management when it goes wrong: artificial sounds on (electric)cars

All over the world (for example USA, EU and Japan) and there are popping up laws banning (or plans for banning) cars that does not make a sound. This as a result of the low level of noise from electric cars at low speeds.

The argument is that if the car doesn’t make a sound you will not look for it and therefore step out in front of it, but also that sound is important for blind persons. The speeds discussed are low, i.e. “parking lot speeds”, at higher speeds all cars make a sound.

Today we have a society where cars are all over the place; this has not always been the case and will hopefully not be the case for ever. Putting warning sounds on cars can only help in situations where cars are the only danger. In all other situations you still need to be careful.

Therefore, banning quiet cars is based on a technocratic view on safety and a narrow understanding of our world (it is not a robust solution). A more robust solution is to teach persons to use appropriate carefulness when moving around. If you can, look where you are going; if you can, listen for sounds that could mean problem; if you can, smell for smells that could hinder your activity and so on and then use the information gained to guide your actions (like lowering your speed if you lack relevant information). This robust solution will work for interactions with cars (silent or not), bikes (silent or not), lions (silent or not) and so on…

At parking lot speed I for one have no problem with stopping for a walking person (blind or not) as long as he or she is not thrown out in front of my car. However, as I biker I have a problem with people with headphones that, without looking, suddenly step out into the bike lane (because they also think, as many legislators do, that everything dangerous sounds a lot).

Do not try to fix a behavioral problem with a technical solution and I am hoping for a quieter future!

Insightfully written about assessing (security) risks

I too seldom push for work by others, but today it is easy. I had this summer the pleasure of reading Terje Avens article “On the allegations that small risks are treated out of proportion to their importance” in Reliability Engineering & System Safety (Volume 140, August 2015). I the article Aven take his starting point from two risk examples, one introduced by Kahneman in “Thinking fast and slow” and one by Joakim Hammerlin in the book “Terrorindustrien”, both examples deals with risks from terrorists. Aven’s point is that when assessing a terror risk there is no right answer. Therefore are terms like under or over estimation irrelevant (as well as objective risk). A terror risk cannot be compared to lotto or other well defined systems, because in such systems there is a right answer.

An insightful article.

This doesn’t mean that we should stop assessing terror risks, but we should understand the difference between types of risk management situations and also always include/assess uncertainties. But don't take my word for it, read Aven’s article instead:

Aven, T. (2015). On the allegations that small risks are treated out of proportion to their importance, Reliability Engineering & System Safety, Volume 140 (pp 116-121).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ress.2015.04.001.

“Sea blindness”

Last week I had the opportunity to visit Stavanger and together with people from Finland, Sweden and Norway talk about Maritime Security. The days in Stavanger looked at a broad spectrum of maritime security issues with a particularly focus on northern Europe.

During the visit we met with, among others, Commodore H.C. Helseth (Royal Norwegian Navy), Deputy Director International Military Staff, HQ NATO. Commodore Helseth introduced us to the concept Sea blindness describing a thing I meet too often:

Sea blindness: the society’s lack of understanding for maritime matters.

People on land take decisions in maritime matters, but without understanding (or seeing) how and why things happen at sea. I meet sea blindness on many levels such as from politicians, government bodies as well as from some ship operators (particularly those with another core business than shipping). I also acknowledge that I sometimes am blind to conditions at sea, but I hope that I then take use of people with the right experience and understanding.

Today at sea it's like if traffic on land were planned and decided by people that never had used a car nor bike and never crossed a street by foot, i.e. only seen it all from afar.
 

More from me on another blog...

It is a longer summary of the article published in WMU Journal of Maritime Affairs: Ship security challenges in high-risk areas: manageable or insurmountable? Please visit the Piracy-Studies blog and read: Managing Security Risks at Sea: A Challenge for the Shipping Industry.

One accident doesn't mean a thing is risky...

A while ago I wrote about a new section of bike lane that I use on the way to work. It was created one year ago with the ambition to improve, but “done with sudden turns (radius 2 meters) were I and other bikers (two-way) are supposed to [as we are turning and keeping our eyes on the cars] share a lane less than 2 meters wide. It is also marked out with curb stones immersing the bike lane risking striking down bikers”.

Today at the very spot described above there was an accident involving at least two bikers (the slow careful types judging by their appearance) and a car. One person looked to be injured enough to be waiting for an ambulance. This is otherwise a quite spot and a lot of people where helping so I hope everything worked out just for the best.

All intersections can have an accident, even in their first year. This without proving that the intersection is a bad one (about this one I however have my doubts).

Comparison between different survivability measures on a generic frigate

New published article in International Journal of maritime Engineering:

Summary

Choosing suitable survivability measures is a demanding task that has to start early in the ship design process. Throughout the design process there is a need for compromises that will define and sometimes limit future operations or capabilities. In this study generic survivability measures are compared. The study also examines the sensitivity of the calculated probabilities to changes in the threat description. The result shows that it is important to investigate the total effect of a hit over a set of relevant ship functions defined for example by survivability levels. The calculations for different threat definitions show that the changes in survivability are substantial when the threat definition is changed. Moreover, the effects of different hit assumptions differ between weapon types. This must be treated as an uncertainty which also should be reflected in the output and weighted into the decisions made, based on the survivability analysis.

Authors: Hans Liwång, Swedish Defence University and Chalmers University of Technology, Henrik Jonsson, Royal Swedish Navy.

Liwång and Jonsson(2015). Comparison between different survivability measures on a genericfrigate. International Journal of maritime Engineering (157) A125-A134.

Survivability of an ocean patrol vessel – Analysis approach and uncertainty treatment

New published article in Marine Structures:


Abstract (somewhat extended)

Military ocean patrol vessels (OPVs) are today an increasingly common type of naval ship. To facilitate the wide range of tasks with small crews, OPVs represent several ship design compromises between, for example, survivability, redundancy and technical endurance. Some of these compromises are new to military ships.

The aim of this study is to examine how the design risk control options in relation to survivability, redundancy and technical endurance can be linked to the operational risks in a patrol and surveillance scenario where the ship can be attacked by a suicide bomber with an IED in a small boat. The ship operation for a generic OPV, including the actions of the threat, is modeled with a Bayesian network describing the scenario and the dependency among different influences. The probabilities for the consequences to the crew, ship buoyancy and maneuverability as a result of a possible attack are calculated.

The scenario is described with expert data collected from subject matter experts. The approach includes an analysis of uncertainty using Monte Carlo analysis and numerical derivative analysis.

The results show that it is possible to link the performance of specific ship design features to the operational risk. Being able to propagate the epistemic uncertainties through the model is important to understand how the uncertainty in the input affects the output and the output uncertainty for the studied case is small relative to the input uncertainty. The study shows that linking different ship design features for aspects such as survivability, redundancy and technical endurance to the operational risk gives important information for the ship design decision-making process.

Author: Hans Liwång
Department of Military Studies, Swedish Defence University, 11593, Stockholm, Sweden.

H. Liwång (2015). Survivability of an oceanpatrol vessel – Analysis approach and uncertainty treatment. Marine Structures, Vol 43, pages 1-21.