Speaker: Loon Ching Tang, PhD, Professor, Department of Industrial Systems Engineering & Management, National University of Singapore

Time: 14:00-15:30 p.m., June 2, 2023, GMT+8

Venue: No. 2 Teaching Building, Room 308

Abstract:

It is increasingly evident that climate change has induced more freqeunt natural disasters of greater magnitude that posed threats and major disruptions to critical infrastructures and systems. In view of this, it is clear that we need to look beyond traditional risk management and develop a better understanding of system resilience. Here, we present a unifying framework for defining and measuring resilience. In particular, a well-known example on supply chain interruption is presented to understand the key drivers of systems resilience. We then present a family of recovery functions of wich the associated parameters are related to the key characteritics of resilience. It is then shown that the parameters of these functions can be used to form a set of resilience indices. Data from Hurricane Sandy in US were used to illustrate the application of the recovery function for benchmarking resilience performance of power supply companies in New York State and New Jersey. We then examine the effect of learning by looking at the data from past disruptions via statistical tests.

Biography:

Dr Loon Ching TANG is currently a professor of Department of Industrial Systems Engineering & Management at the National University of Singapore and a Fellow of the Academy of Engineering, Singapore. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from Cornell University in the field of Operations Research in 1992 and has published extensively in areas related to industrial engineering and operations research. He has been presented with a number of best paper awards including the IIE Transactions 2010 Best Application Paper Award and 2012 R.A. Evans/P.K. McElroy Award for the best paper at Annual RAMS. Prof Tang is the main author of the award-winning book: Six Sigma: Advanced Tools for Black Belts and Master Black Belts. Besides being active in the forefront of academic research, in the last 30 years, Prof Tang has served as a consultant for many organizations, such as the Ministry of Home Affair, Singapore Power Grid, Republic of Singapore Air Force, Seagate, HP, Phillips, etc, on a wide range of projects aiming at improving organizational and operations excellence; especially through better management of engineering assets. He is currently a fellow of ISEAM, the Co-Editor-in-Chief of Quality & Reliability Engineering International, editorial review board member of Journal of Quality Technology.

Source: College of Engineering