Coping with Uncertainty: Modeling and Policy Issues

✍ Scribed by Prof. Dr. Kurt Marti, Prof. Dr. Yuri Ermoliev, Dr. Marek Makowski, Prof. Dr. Georg Pflug (auth.)

• Publisher: Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 329
• Series: Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems 581
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Ongoing global changes bring fundamentally new scientific problems requiring new concepts and tools. A key issue concerns a vast variety of practically irreducible uncertainties, which challenge our traditional models and require new concepts and analytical tools. The uncertainty critically dominantes, e.g., the climate change debates. In short, the dilemma is concerned with enormous costs vs. massive uncertainties of potential extreme impacts. Traditional scientific approaches usually rely on real observations and experiments. Yet no sufficient observations exist for new problems, and "pure" experiments and learning by doing may be very expensive, dangerous, or simply impossible. In addition, available historical observations are contaminated by actions, policies. The complexity of new problems does not allow to achieve enough certainty by increasing the resolution of models or by bringing in more links. Hence, new tools for modeling and management of uncertainty are needed, as given in this book.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages 1-1
Facets of Robust Decisions....Pages 3-28
Stress Testing via Contamination....Pages 29-46
Structured Modeling for Coping with Uncertainty in Complex Problems....Pages 47-64
Front Matter....Pages 65-65
Using Monte Carlo Simulation to Treat Physical Uncertainties in Structural Reliability....Pages 67-83
Explicit Methods for the Computation of Structural Reliabilities in Stochastic Plastic Analysis....Pages 85-103
Statistical Analysis of Catastrophic Events....Pages 105-117
Scene Interpretation Using Bayesian Network Fragments....Pages 119-130
Front Matter....Pages 131-131
General Equilibrium Models with Discrete Choices in a Spatial Continuum....Pages 133-154
Sequential Downscaling Methods for Estimation from Aggregate Data....Pages 155-169
Optimal Control for a Class of Uncertain Systems....Pages 171-183
Uncertainties in Medical Processes Control....Pages 185-192
Front Matter....Pages 193-193
Impacts of Uncertainty and Increasing Returns on Sustainable Energy Development and Climate Change: A Stochastic Optimization Approach....Pages 195-216
Stochasticity in Electric Energy Systems Planning....Pages 217-239
Stochastic Programming Based PERT Modeling....Pages 241-255
Towards Implementable Nonlinear Stochastic Programming....Pages 257-279
Front Matter....Pages 281-281
Endogenous Risks and Learning in Climate Change Decision Analysis....Pages 283-300
Pricing Related Projects....Pages 301-313
Precaution: The Willingness to Accept Costs to Avert Uncertain Danger....Pages 315-330

✦ Subjects

Operations Research/Decision Theory; Optimization; Numerical and Computational Methods in Engineering