The public depends on competent risk assessment from the federal government and the scientific community to grapple with the threat of pollution. When risk reports turn out to be overblownâ€"or when risks are overlookedâ€"public skepticism abounds. This comprehensive and readable book explores how the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can improve its risk assessment practices, with a focus on implementation of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments. With a wealth of detailed information, pertinent examples, and revealing analysis, the volume explores the "default option" and other basic concepts. It offers two views of EPA operations: The first examines how EPA currently assesses exposure to hazardous air pollutants, evaluates the toxicity of a substance, and characterizes the risk to the public. The second, more holistic, view explores how EPA can improve in several critical areas of risk assessment by focusing on cross-cutting themes and incorporating more scientific judgment. This comprehensive volume will be important to the EPA and other agencies, risk managers, environmental advocates, scientists, faculty, students, and concerned individuals.
This book deals with an often-neglected feature of location problems, namely uncertainty, by combining two related fields: location theory and optimization. Written by leading researchers and practitioners in these fields, each chapter examines one aspect of the location process in different contexts, such as supply chains; location decisions under congestion; disaster management; design of resilient facilities; uncertainty in the health sector; and facility location in the retail sector under uncertainty. The book also addresses methodological aspects, such as chance-constrained approaches, heuristic algorithms, scenario approaches, and simulation. As such, it provides decision-makers with essential methods, tools and approaches to help them deal with these uncertainties. It is mainly intended for graduate students in the fields of operations research and logistics, as well as professionals in logistics and supply chain management.
This Open Access handbook published at the IAMG's 50th anniversary, presents a compilation of invited path-breaking research contributions by award-winning geoscientists who have been instrumental in shaping the IAMG. It contains 45 chapters that are categorized broadly into five parts (i) theory, (ii) general applications, (iii) exploration and resource estimation, (iv) reviews, and (v) reminiscences covering related topics like mathematical geosciences, mathematical morphology, geostatistics, fractals and multifractals, spatial statistics, multipoint geostatistics, compositional data analysis, informatics, geocomputation, numerical methods, and chaos theory in the geosciences.
Mathematical modelling has become in recent years an essential tool for the prediction of environmental change and for the development of sustainable policies. Yet, many of the uncertainties associated with modelling efforts appear poorly understood by many, especially by policy makers. This book attempts for the first time to cover the full range of issues related to model uncertainties, from the subjectivity of setting up a conceptual model of a given system, all the way to communicating the nature of model uncertainties to non-scientists and accounting for model uncertainties in policy decisions. Theoretical chapters, providing background information on specific steps in the modelling process and in the adoption of models by end-users, are complemented by illustrative case studies dealing with soils and global climate change. All the chapters are authored by recognized experts in their respective disciplines, and provide a timely and uniquely comprehensive coverage of an important field.
The present book includes extended and revised versions of a set of selected papers presented at the 18th International Joint Conference on e-Business and Telecommunications, ICETE 2021, held as an online web-based event (due to the COVID-19 pandemic) in July 2021. The 17 full papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 197 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: e-Business and security and cryptography.