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The 2013 risk management embedded topical meeting - Risk Management for Complex Socio-technical Systems (RM4CSS) - will be a part of the 2013 American Nuclear Society Winter meeting scheduled for November 10-14 at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C.

The RM4CSS meeting will be the fifth in the continuation of a series of successful meetings on risk management that were held in 1989, 1992, 2003, and 2009. The past risk management meetings were held in Parsippany, Boston, San Diego, and Washington, D.C.

The 2013 meeting will welcome management, analysts, safety professionals, risk personnel, researchers, and students from all over the world for discussions on classical and multidisciplinary issues of risk, safety, reliability, and security of nuclear power and other complex systems. This meeting aims to pave the way for more comprehensive and technically-sound solutions for current risk management obstacles. The cross-disciplinary sessions of the meeting will help both industry and regulatory organizations reach a consensus on the best approaches for managing risk. We are dedicated to achieving the following objectives:

1. To advance the state of knowledge in understanding risk management by analyzing both technical and social risk contributing factors and the issues arising from their dynamic interactions.
2. To provide a forum on the creation of a common risk management vocabulary so that experts from technical domains (e.g., engineering, mathematics, and physics) and social fields (e.g., management, economics, psychology, organizational behavior, policy) can use it to resolve the challenges of complex high-hazard systems.
3. To discuss profound integration of probabilistic and deterministic perspectives for risk, safety, reliability, and security analysis.
4. To exchange risk management theories and techniques applied in nuclear power and other hazardous industries so that all may benefit.
5. To create a close relationship between the science and practice of risk management by gathering a group of experts from academia, industry, regulatory agencies, and national labs to share ideas.
6. To evaluate state-of-the-art, multi-dimensional risk management, considering diverse interrelated performances (e.g., safety, cost, quality) of high-risk organizations.
7. To expand the search for reliable risk acceptance criteria.
8. To explore more effective risk communication to facilitate required changes.

Various studies from diverse disciplines can contribute to the expansion of the boundaries of socio-technical risk management and, therefore, any technical papers that might benefit one of the listed topics will be very welcome. We are also open to adding innovative special sessions.

This conference will have full-length, peer-reviewed technical papers that will be published in a book post meeting. Summaries of the papers will also be published in the ANS Transactions.

    Ronald Knief, Ph.D., Sandia National Laboratory
    raknief@sandia.gov

    Zahra Mohaghegh, Ph.D., Dep. of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Eng., U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
    zahra13@illinois.edu