Coping with Uncertainty

Support for addressing the on-going global changes needs solutions for new scientific problems which in turn require new concepts and tools. A key issue concerns a vast variety of irreducible uncertainties, including extreme events of high multidimensional consequences, e.g., the climate change. The dilemma is concerned with enormous costs versus massive uncertainties of extreme impacts. Traditional scientific approaches rely on real observations and experiments. Yet no sufficient observations exist for new problems, and "pure" experiments, and learning by doing may be expensive, dangerous, or impossible. In addition, the available historical observations are often contaminated by past actions, and policies. Thus, tools are presented for the explicit treatment of uncertainties using "synthetic" information composed of available "hard" data from historical observations, the results of possible experiments, and scientific facts, as well as "soft" data from experts' opinions, and scenarios.

• Frames
• Modelling Uncertainty
• Optimal Decision under Uncertainty
• Robust Optimal Solution
• Technical Systems
• control
• learning
• linear optimization
• modeling
• optimal design
• optimization
• robust design
• uncertainty

• Aerospace Engineering and, Technology, Federal Armed Forces University Munich, Neubiberg/München, Germany

  Kurt Marti

• Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), International Institute for, Laxenburg, Austria

  Yuri Ermoliev, Marek Makowski

Policies and ethics