Blog Archives

No grit No roads No show?

No grit means no cleared roads means no one able to get anywhere and a no-show of people everywhere. Employees not coming to work because of extreme weather will cost the UK £12,000,000,000,000.

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Security and continuity of supply

Today’s paper describes how Finland views logistics and supply as important to national security and how the LOGHU project was created to develop a framework for identification and ranking of threats and corresponding countermeasures.

Posted in BOOKS and BOOK CHAPTERS
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Road Vulnerability

Today we are going back in time, to one of the seminal articles in road vulnerability. It is a conceptual paper that provides the basis for why road vulnerability needs to be a more important issue .

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Transportation Lifelines and Critical Infrastructure

This is the first paper that sparked my research interest in transportation vulnerability, and what would later become the focus area of my research: the cost of transportation vulnerability and the benefit of transportation reliability.

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Bad locations = bad logistics?

How are companies located in sparse transport networks affected by supply chain disruptions? This article develops a new framework for the categorization of supply chains, and introduces the notion of the constrained supply chain.

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Highway Vulnerability and Criticality Assessment

It is important to distinguish to between criticality and vulnerability when assessing the importance of the road and highway network. Collectively, these factors are an indication of the conditions, concerns, consequences, and capabilities that might cause an operating agency to label an asset “critical.”

Posted in REPORTS and WHITEPAPERS
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Are roads more important than computers?

The objective of the first project ‘Protection of Society’ (POS) or ‘Beskyttelse av Samfunnet’ (BAS, in Norwegian) was to describe how modern society will react to and can protect itself when facing modern warfare. In doing so, the report identified key components and functions that are essential to a modern society, and interdependencies between them.

Posted in REPORTS and WHITEPAPERS
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Engineering transportation lifelines

New Zealand is probably not the fist country that comes to mind when thinking of state-of-the-art transportation lifeline engineering. Nonetheless, I think it is time to consider New Zealand as being one of the countries at the very forefront.

Posted in REPORTS and WHITEPAPERS
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When disaster strikes…

Transportation recovery plans need to look beyond their mere purpose of addressing hazards in the transportation network. The transportation network is essential to many community. This implies that the restoration of the transportation network also means the restoration of the economy and the society, not just the infrastructure.

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Sparse transportation networks – a nightmare

Sparse transportation networks, like in Norway, are a recipe for supply chain disruptions. Furthermore, unlike in regions with a dense transportation network, supply chain management in a sparse network setting comes close to being business continuity management.

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America’s Crumbling Infrastructure

My daily morning routine includes a cup of coffee while watching the World Business Report on BBC World News. Today they had a special report on America’s crumbling and failing infrastructure.

Posted in REPORTS and WHITEPAPERS
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Norwegian roads are dangerous!

In a recent study undertaken by the Molde Research Institute in Norway, a point is made that the typical socio-economic impact of road network disruptions in Western Norway varies greatly, depending on a) the traffic volume, b) the actual possibilities of rerouting traffic and c) the composition of the traffic that uses the impacted road.

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Accessibility Index – Transport Network Vulnerability

The starting point for this paper is the question of how to define and find critical locations in a transport network. A network node is vulnerable if loss or degradation of a small number of links diminishes the accessibility of the node. A network link is critical if loss or degradation of the links diminishes the accessibility of the network or of particular nodes

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How New Zealand develops resilient organisations

As our infrastructure and organisations become ever more networked and interdependent there is a growing need to focus on managing overall system risk. In particular, there is a need to focus not only on the vulnerability of our systems to failure, but also on our ability to manage and minimise the impact of any failures.

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Pålitelighet og sårbarhet av transportsystemer

Transportsystemer som veg og jernbane danner ryggraden i et moderne samfunn. Påliteligheten og sårbarheten i et transportsystem blir dermed avgjørende faktorer ikke bare i konkurranse- og markedsøyemed, men også i beredskapssammenheng, for å kunne opprettholde normal samfunnsdrift.

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The reliability and vulnerability of transportation lifelines

Transportation networks like freeways and interstate highways are the main backbone of modern society. Consequently, the reliability or vulnerability of any transportation network is thus a decisive factor not only in terms of market outreach and competition, but also in terms of continuity, to ensure a 24/7 operation of the community we live in.

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A spatial framework for modeling hazards to transportation lifelines

Transportation networks are exposed to a wide range of natural hazards and this study has developed a GIS tool for analyzing these hazards. The primary hazards included in this study are avalanches, landslides, flooding, earthquakes, wildfires, and rockfall. The GIS software used was MFWorks

Posted in my PUBLIC PRESENCE
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ARTICLES and PAPERS
Supply chain risk in turbulent environments
An intriguing title caught my eye today.  Supply chain risk in turbulent environments - A conceptua[...]
Measuring supply chain risk management
This paper was suggested by one of my readers, and upon reading it I must admit that it IS one of th[...]
BOOKS and BOOK CHAPTERS
Book Review: Managing Risk and Security
One of my readers suggested this book to me via  a comment on my supply chain literature list pages[...]
Resilience times four
Resilience. It is not so much about reducing the number of things that go wrong, but it is about imp[...]
REPORTS and WHITEPAPERS
London Olympics and Business Continuity
Are UK businesses, and in particular London businesses, unprepared for the London Olympics in 2012? [...]
Assess the vulnerability of your production system
So far I have reviewed "international" literature and web sites, and it is only fitting that now it [...]
from HERE and THERE
Volcanic ash cloud - really a surprise?
Last week a volcanic eruption on Iceland took Europe's civil aviation authorities by total surprise,[...]
Suites - what suites?
I have been swamped with work this week. In fact, so swamped that I forgot to watch episode two of "[...]