Risk Assessment

INTRODUCTION: Fars is a disaster-prone province which is affected by a myriad of disasters, such as floods, earthquakes, fires, and traffic accidents. Therefore, the present study aimed to evaluate the disaster risk of hospitals in Fars province in 2017. METHODS: This descriptive cross-sectional study was performed in 2017. Out of 90 hospitals in Fars province, 51 centers cooperated in the presented study. Six prevalent disasters and crises in Fars province were identified using the recorded incidents in the last 20 years in the Emergency Operation Center (EOC) of Shiraz University of Medical Sciences. A book entitled "National tools for the assessment of risks and indicators of specialized competencies of the health sector in response to hazards and disasters (risk map), which was written for the Ministry of Health of Iran in 2014, was used to assess and obtain the risk score. The maximum and minimum risk scores were obtained at 95 and 19, respectively, and the data were analyzed in Excel 2016. FINDINGS: The mean and standard deviation of the obtained scores for different hazards were reported as 56.039±175.785 (earthquake), 45.962 ± 322.17 (seasonal flood), 575.786.195±19.57 (drought), 909.18±686.36 (chemical threats), 47.764±18.066 (human-caused fires), and 50.235±15.709 (power outage). In most hospitals, the risk of earthquakes and the negative impact of drought were higher than other hazards, while the chemical threats obtained the lowest score. CONCLUSION: Since Fars province is a disaster-prone area, the risk assessment should be periodically performed at short intervals to identify hazards with higher risk scores and implement corrective measures in this regard.

INTRODUCTION: Nowshahr port city can suffer a lot of damages in case of an earthquake due to its location in seismotectonics of Alborz with high seismic hazard, proximity to the sea, and expansion on isolated sediments. Therefore, the recognition and analysis of the extent of earthquake vulnerability in different areas of this port city can reduce damages and losses. This study was conducted to analyze and evaluate the earthquake risk and vulnerability and identify safe areas in the city of Nowshahr in times of earthquake. METHODS: In this study, the earthquake risk of Nowshahr city was analyzed based on the Wisner model and the application of multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) approach using fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP). Initially, the effective criteria, sub-criteria, and indicators in the earthquake risk and vulnerability components were collected through a systematic review based on previous research, field survey, and experts' opinion, and were then screened and weighed by the Delphi method. Finally, the earthquake risk and vulnerability maps were extracted and drawn using a weighted linear combination method and fuzzy index maps related to each component. FINDINGS: According to the findings, about 97.13% (2,810.229 ha), 2.75% (79.567 ha), and 0.12% (3.441 ha) of Nowshahr city were placed in the low, medium, and high-risk category. CONCLUSION: Analysis of risk maps showed that the earthquake risk was higher in the central and northwestern parts of Nowshahr city than in the other areas. These areas were densely populated with heavy traffic jams, in which located high-risk facilities, such as gas lines and water and sewer networks, that reminded of the necessity of planning and urgent action regarding the improvement of urban settlements and organization of urban spaces in this region.

Qualitative information security risk assessments are somewhat subjective and the high degree of subjectivity associated with the perception of risk means that management is often skeptical of risk analysis results, and is unwilling to make important decisions based on that. Besides, the process of information security risk assessment is quite complex and rife with uncertainty and without taken into account the uncertainty of information security risk assessment the results can be misleading. Therefore, in this paper, the Fuzzy Multi Criteria Group Decision Making (FMCGDM) model is proposed to address the above-mentioned problems. The focus group method used to identify risk parameters and the Delphi method is used to construct a hierarchy for risk parameters. The findings of this research would be useful for the information security department to become more capable in analyzing the InfoSec risks and reducing the consequences of subjective assessment. A case study involving an actual information security risk management project was presented to illustrate the use of the proposed model. Computational results demonstrated the efficiency and effectiveness of the presented model that can assist InfoSec risk analyst to better evaluate InfoSec risk.

Purpose: This research aimed to identify and evaluate the risks of content production in the governmental digital libraries of Tehran.Method: In terms of essence, this research is synthetic (library studies, qualitative and quantitative), and regarding purpose, it is an applied one.  In the first part, using the studies of the research literature, a set of indicators related to the risks of content production in the governmental libraries of Tehran was obtained. The second part of this research involved a fuzzy Delphi approach that was conducted at two stages among 20 experts. In this stage, a researcher-made questionnaire based on the indicators obtained from the first stage was used. The third part of the research was a survey-analysis conducted with a quantitative method using a questionnaire made out based on the results of qualitative stage with three criteria: the probability of occurrence, effect intensity, and the inability of organization to respond and was distributed among 100 managers and experts of governmental digital libraries in Tehran.Findings: In this research, the risks of content production were identified and fell into nine major categories (human force, environmental factors, infrastructure, protection and maintenance,  creators`  technical rights, integration, content evaluation of sources and authors and information security).Conclusion: The results of this evaluation show that digital libraries are not exactly at their best level when it comes to their responses to the risk of human resources, authors' rights, and integration risks.