Uncertainty and Risk in Civil Engineering Practice

Basic Considerations

As human beings, ... being alive means seeking opportunities and taking risks. As knowledge professionals living in the 21st century, this means coping with an increasingly complex number of uncertainties for humans living in this environment. We seek to understand better how these uncertainties can be characterized and managed. The essence of this article and the experience for engineers in general and civil engineers in particular is that manageable uncertainty is, by definition, termed risk, and its kindred cousin is termed hazard. This causes us to experience the

" ... human dread of and fascination for risk and the increasingly important role of risk analysis within societies ... " cite note-2 1/23

(Ibid.) and, by extension, civil engineering. McDaniels et al. argue that risk management has been fundamental to our social and governance development for the past 10,000 years. The scale and shape of the uncertainties faced in this period shaped the societies that have developed today. The central thrust of this effort over the centuries has been to reshape and re-frame our understanding and conception of uncertainty from one of complete unknowing and simple acceptance as our fate in life to one of management (cf"Against the Gods" concept in Bernstein's book [21). All the knowledge professions and disciplines have struggled with managing uncertainty for it is impossible to manage unbounded uncertainty. [Note 1] As will be outlined below, the reason why professions such as civil engineering have been successful acting in the face of uncertainty lie in the profession's ability to reduce a broad variety of uncertainties into a series of increasingly smaller and crucially, bounded subsets that can be managed. These are called 'risks. More recently, this process has evolved to the point where individual disciplines such as Civil Engineering (CE) has developed their knowledge and models to perform risk analysis. Risk is also being taught as a distinct discipline and specialty practice within Civil Engineering but it has some unique features that set it apart from other more classical practices within CE. AS such it is one of the first of some very specialized CE practices that use knowledge about civil engineering knowledge, or meta-knowledge. Other examples of civil engineering metaknowledge are project controls and quality controls.

Notes

See McDaniels et al. 2004 for an extensive discussion and bibliography on the historical development of Risk Analysis and some key milestones in the 20th century.
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The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines uncertainty:

"the quality or state of being uncertain," which is a circular definition. Likewise, one could define uncertainty as the state of not being certain. Synonyms are distrust, doubt, misgiving, mistrust, reservation, skepticism, and suspicion. Another writer added indefinite, indeterminate, not certain to occur, problematical, unreliable, untrustworthy, unknown beyond doubt, dubious, doubtful, not clearly identified or defined, not constant, variable, and fitful to the list.

Han, Paul KJ, William MP Klein, and Neeraj K. Arora. "Varieties of Uncertainty in Health Care A Conceptual Taxonomy." Medical Decision Making 31.6, (2011 ): 828-838.

Han, ct. al. noted that any definition of uncertainty encompasses " ... numerous types, sources, and manifestations of uncertainty, and ... (any) ... useful working definition of uncertainty needs to specify the concept underlying these varied meanings of the term." (Ibid.)

Implicit in this definition of uncertainty as a "state of' is ...

" ... a conceptualization of uncertainty as a subjective, cognitive experience of people--a state of mind rather than a feature of the objective world. Furthermore, the defining feature of this state appears to be a lack of knowledge about some aspect of reality. Importantly, however, the concept of uncertainty also implies a subjective consciousness or awareness of one's lack of knowledge, without which one could not feel uncertain; uncertainty is a form of "meta-cognition" ... ( or alternatively, its main component, meta-knowledge) ... -a knowing about knowing." (Han, 2011, op. cit., Emphasis added)