Disaster Engineering

摘要

Disasters come in variety of forms. Floods, accidents, IT system crashes, blackouts, terrorist attacks, etc. They hurtour life sustaining systems, thereby affect quality of life, and often, cause damages that are not recoverable.Disasters often times cause other disasters, resulting in a chain of disasters. As we build more services on theexisting systems and rely on them, the potential damage that can result from disasters increase exponentially.Moreover, the new services built on the existing systems may bring along additional weaknesses and vulnerabilitiesto various threats. Since we are never free from disasters, we have to be prepared for them. Preparedness requiressolid understanding of disasters. Therefore, we provide a diverse set of classifications and investigate the possiblemodeling approaches for discovering more about disasters. We investigate the life cycle aspects of disasters andpropose preparedness levels that can be used while designing systems, including safety and security considerations.The principle of self-similarity allows the set of the unknown-knowns to benefit from the interdisciplinary research.