Australian national critical infrastructure protection : a case study

Australia has developed sophisticated national security policies and physical security agencies to protect against current and future security threats associated with critical infrastructure protection and cyber warfare protection. This paper will discuss some of the common security risks that face Australia and how their government policies and strategies have been developed and changed over time, for example, the proposed Australian Homeland Security department. This paper will discuss the different steps that Australia has undertaken in relation to developing national policies to deal with critical infrastructure protection.

Analysis and modelling of critical infrastructure systems

The increasing complexity and interconnectedness of critical infrastructure systems, including the information systems and communication networks that support their existence and functionality, poses questions and challenges. Particularly, in terms of modelling and analysis of the security, survivability and ultimately reliability and continued availability of critical infrastructure systems and the services they deliver to modern society. The focus of this research enquiry is with regard to critiquing and modelling critical infrastructure systems. There are numerous systems analyse and modelling approaches that outline any number of differing methodological approaches, each with their own characteristics, expertise, strengths and weaknesses. The intention of this research is to investigate the merit of applying a ‘softer’ approach to critical infrastructure system security analysis and modelling that broadly views the systems in holistic terms, including their relationships with other systems. The intention is not to discuss or criticise existing research applying quantitative approaches, but to discuss a ‘softer’ system analysis and modelling approach in a security context that is adaptable to analysis modelling of critical infrastructure systems.

Formulating an organizational knowledge strategy : the influence of existing IT infrastructure

This paper questions the influence of a pre-existing information technology (IT) infrastructure on the formulation of an organizational knowledge strategy. We draw on a classification of four different strategic views of IT infrastructure and explore how the historic investment in IT infrastructure enables and constrains the formulation of knowledge strategy in four case organizations. The four case organizations are representative of different scenarios of historic investments in IT infrastructure and knowledge strategy formulation. Our findings indicate that an IT infrastructure that is minimal or fragmented constrains the formulation of an explicit knowledge strategy. We further find that an extensive existing IT infrastructure enables the pursuit of an explicit knowledge strategy, but that even an elaborate IT infrastructure can introduce some constraints on IT facilitated knowledge processes in the organization.

Using action research to improve the quality of teaching in basic education in remote schools in PNG.

This paper discusses the use of action research with teachers in remote primary schools in PNG to provide sustainable professional learning to help improve the quality of schooling. It arises from an ADRA research project being undertaken by the authors. The paper describes the project’s research design and its implementation to investigate the introduction, implementation and feasibility of teachers using action research to solve their own problems related to providing basic education in remote communities. If successful, action research may prove to be an effective approach to sustaining professional learning communities in locations where traditional approaches and means of professional development are difficult or impossible to sustain.

The paper describes the research team’s approach to identifying and engaging schools in remote districts of Western and East Sepik provinces, surveying teachers in those districts about their professional learning needs and circumstances, identifying schools to trial action research, and to undertake the fieldwork to implement action research and to study its implementation. The teachers’ experiences with using action research are presented in the context of their particular research topics chosen for their school. To date, the findings suggest that teachers can use action research to help them improve the quality of the education they provide for children. However, the initiation and sustainability of such an action research approach is influenced by the capacities and commitment of head teachers and standards officers, in particular, valuing and understanding reflective practice and action research for professional learning in school communities.

Infrastructure development using alliances : lessons and observations

This research provides a deeper insight into the performance of Alliances for the construction of road, rail and water projects. The results review 18 public infrastructure projects across Australia that utilized the Alliance form of procurement. The results were based on interviews which addressed the most important management issues impacting on the performance of Alliances. The respondents were selected from a sample of members of the Alliance Leadership Teams (ALT) and the Alliance Management Teams (AMT) that had recently completed a range of infrastructure projects. Results revealed that communication and trust between the ALT and AMT teams was a major issue that impacted on the effectiveness of the Alliance. Further, the research identified several factors that are necessary preconditions for the Alliance to be successful. The study reported on the perceived performance of Alliances to deliver in the key areas that was identified by the client organizations prior to commencement of the project. There are an increasing number of international organizations contemplating construction projects using “Alliancing”. The results of this paper will assist clients in making more informed decisions about the possibility that this form of procurement will be effective in meeting the needs of the project and its stakeholders.

A social network analysis model for analysing stakeholder-associated safety risks in infrastructure projects

An important strategy in the long-term blueprint for making Australia's 18 capital and major regional cities more productive, sustainable and liveable is to develop high quality public infrastructure systems to improve civic quality of life. Because of the unique features of construction activities, such as long period, complicated processes, and dynamic organizational structures, infrastructure projects normally involve multiple stakeholders and are subject to various risks, especially safety issues. Any negligence or mismanagement of critical safety risks will have huge impact on achieving project objectives and success. Although many previous studies have identified and assessed various safety risks in construction industry, a main research gap is that these studies ignored a fact that most risks are interrelated and associated with internal and external stakeholders of the projects. The lack of a theoretical foundation and appropriate methods for analysing stakeholder-associated safety risks and their interdependencies in infrastructure projects hinders effective risk management processes and the formulations of decision strategies. This research aims at enabling higher performance in strategic safety risk management in infrastructure projects through the development of a holistic risk analysis model using Stakeholder and Social Network Theories. The outcomes can broaden project managers' awareness of emerging influential safety risks and enhance their ability to perceive, understand, assess, and mitigate safety risks in an effective and efficient way; thereby higher performance in strategic risk management could be achieved in infrastructure projects.

Evaluating the travel, physical activity and carbon impacts of a 'natural experiment' in the provision of new walking and cycling infrastructure : methods for the core module of the iConnect study

Introduction Improving infrastructure to support walking and cycling is often regarded as fundamental to encouraging their widespread uptake. However, there is little evidence that specific provision of this kind has led to a significant increase in walking or cycling in practice, let alone wider impacts such as changes in overall physical activity or carbon emissions. Connect2 is a major new project that aims to promote walking and cycling in the UK by improving local pedestrian and cycle routes. It therefore provides a useful opportunity to contribute new evidence in this field by means of a natural experimental study.

Methods and analysis iConnect is an independent study that aims to integrate the perspectives of public health and transport research on the measurement and evaluation of the travel, physical activity and carbon impacts of the Connect2 programme. In this paper, the authors report the study design and methods for the iConnect core module. This comprised a cohort study of residents living within 5 km of three case study Connect2 projects in Cardiff, Kenilworth and Southampton, supported by a programme of qualitative interviews with key informants about the projects. Participants were asked to complete postal questionnaires, repeated before and after the opening of the new infrastructure, which collected data on demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, travel, car fuel purchasing and physical activity, and potential psychosocial and environmental correlates and mediators of those behaviours. In the absence of suitable no-intervention control groups, the study design drew on heterogeneity in exposure both within and between case study samples to provide for a counterfactual.

Ethics and dissemination The study was approved by the University of Southampton Research Ethics Committee. The findings will be disseminated through academic presentations, peer-reviewed publications and the study website (http://www.iconnect.ac.uk) and by means of a national seminar at the end of the study.

Integrated modelling of cost-effective siting and operation of flow-control infrastructure for river ecosystem conservation

Wetland and floodplain ecosystems along many regulated rivers are highly stressed, primarily due to a lack of environmental flows of appropriate magnitude, frequency, duration, and timing to support ecological functions. In the absence of increased environmental flows, the ecological health of river ecosystems can be enhanced by the operation of existing and new flow-control infrastructure (weirs and regulators) to return more natural environmental flow regimes to specific areas. However, determining the optimal investment and operation strategies over time is a complex task due to several factors including the multiple environmental values attached to wetlands, spatial and temporal heterogeneity and dependencies, nonlinearity, and time-dependent decisions. This makes for a very large number of decision variables over a long planning horizon. The focus of this paper is the development of a nonlinear integer programming model that accommodates these complexities. The mathematical objective aims to return the natural flow regime of key components of river ecosystems in terms of flood timing, flood duration, and interflood period. We applied a 2-stage recursive heuristic using tabu search to solve the model and tested it on the entire South Australian River Murray floodplain. We conclude that modern meta-heuristics can be used to solve the very complex nonlinear problems with spatial and temporal dependencies typical of environmental flow allocation in regulated river ecosystems. The model has been used to inform the investment in, and operation of, flow-control infrastructure in the South Australian River Murray.

Damage identification of civil infrastructure in the time domain using FEM calibrated ARMAX model

Due to environmental loads, mechanical damages, structural aging and human factors, civil infrastructure inevitably deteriorate during their service lives. Since their damage may claim human lives and cause significant economic losses, how to identify damages and assess structural conditions timely and accurately has drawn increasingly more attentions from structural engineering community worldwide. In this study, a fast and sensitive time domain damage identification method will be developed. First, a high quality finite element model is built and the structural responses are simulated under different damage scenarios. Based on the simulated data, an Auto Regressive Moving Average Exogenous (ARMAX) model is then developed and calibrated. The calibrated ARMAX model can be used to identify damage in different scenarios through model updating process using clonal selection algorithm (CSA). The identification results demonstrate the performance of the proposed methodology, which has the potential to be used for damage identification in practices.

Utilise basic legal concepts in the completion of work routines RUA AG2810 RM

A study guide for the unit of competency, RUA AG2810RM

Critical uncertainty factors for efficient risk allocation in privately financed public infrastructure projects in Australia

Risk allocation in privately financed public infrastructure projects, commonly referred to as public-private partnership (PPP) projects, is a challenging job due to the nature of incomplete contracting. Choosing a risk allocation strategy could be viewed as the process of deciding the proportion of risk management attributable to the public and private partners based on a series of characteristics of the risk management service transaction in question. These characteristics can be related to the various uncertainty factors. In this study, uncertainty factors have been grouped into Institutional, Social and industrial, Economic, and Project-specific categories and examined in order to achieve efficient risk allocation and minimize risk management-related costs in a long-term view. Critical uncertainty factors for the allocation of three major risks have been identified through an industry-wide survey in Australia. These identified critical uncertainty factors are expected to help decision-makers from both public and private sectors choose efficient allocation strategies for major risks. Future research directions are also set out.

Critical uncertainty factors for efficient allocation of demand risk in privately financed public infrastructure projects in Australia

Risk allocation in privately financed public infrastructure projects, which are mainly referred as public-private partnership (PPP) projects, is a challenging job due to the nature of incomplete contracting. Among the various risks that may eventually materialise, demand risk is one of the major challenges that PPPs face. Choosing a risk allocation strategy could be viewed as the process of deciding the proportion of risk management responsibility between public and private partners based on a series of characteristics of risk management service transaction in question. These characteristics are more or less related to the various uncertainty factors. In this study, various uncertainty factors have been examined in order to achieve efficient allocation of demand risk and minimise risk management-related costs in a long-term view. Critical uncertainty factors have been identified through an industry-wide survey in Australia. Future research directions are also set out.

Exploring potential success factors for procurement of privately financed infrastructure

Australia has joined many governments to adopt public-private partnership (PPP) as a major strategy for procuring infrastructure for decades. However, failures have occurred although the market has been considered to be a mature and sophisticated one. Failures have typically been traced back to inappropriate economic evaluation and a lack of value-for-money. In particular, a literature review has identified that there was no holistic consideration on the evaluation of procurement transactions of PPP projects. The transaction costs of PPPs were not handled properly. In this paper, theories of transaction cost economics are proposed for the purpose of such a holistic institutional economic evaluation. These theories are analysed in order to identify potential critical success factors for a strategic infrastructure procurement framework. The potential critical success factors are identified and grouped into a number of categories that match the theories of transaction cost economics. These categories include (1) Asset Specificity, (2) Organizational Capability, (3) Transaction Frequency, (4) Behavioural Uncertainty, and (5) Environmental Uncertainty. These potential critical success factors may be subject to an empirical test in the future. The proposed framework will offer decision makers with an insight into project life cycle economic outcomes needed to successfully deliver PPPs.