Venue: Room-31.C1.060

Abstract
"How safe is safe enough?" is a century-old question that has motivated the development of rational approaches for managing the safety of technological systems. In structural engineering, it has led to the search for target probabilities of failure that provide an acceptable level of life safety while making efficient use of societal resources.
The economic evaluation of safety standards naturally led to benefit--cost analysis and the need to assign an economic value to reductions in fatality risk, known as the Value of a Statistical Life (VSL). Despite its widespread use in regulations, the VSL remains controversial because of the ethical issues surrounding the monetary valuation of human life.
This seminar presents the Life-Quality Index (LQI), a social indicator that provides a societal basis for selecting target reliabilities in structural design. The LQI integrates the economic and life-safety consequences of structural safety decisions in a manner consistent with the principles of benefit-cost analysis.

Biography
Professor Mahesh Pandey is a distinguished researcher with over 20 years of experience in the probabilistic safety assessment of infrastructure systems. As an Industrial Research Chair, he leads a large research program funded by Canada's nuclear industry and the Science and Engineering Research Council. His research primarily focuses on the theory of stochastic processes and its applications to optimize the management of engineering systems. Dr. Pandey has co-authored more than 300 peer-reviewed research papers and served as a Co-Editor for the Journal of Reliability Engineering and System Safety.