Project: Environmental Risk Assessment of Chemicals

Busy is a Mathematica^® Package for Bayesian, Risk and Second-Order Distributions. It has been developed at the Institute for Risk Assessment Studies (IRAS, University of Utrecht) in the project: Tools for Probabilistic Uncertainty Analysis in Environmental Risk Assessment of Chemicals, a project in the Long-range Research Initiative (LRi) at the European Chemical Industry Council (CEFIC).

Busy focuses on (new) mathematical methods for Risk Characterization and therefore is a research tool to advance the theory and practice of Risk Characterization of chemical substances. No specific chemicals, nor environmental assessments, are built into Busy. Researchers, risk analysts, or risk managers, whether from government, academia, or industry, may use Busy at their own responsibility. Neither CEFIC/ LRi, nor IRAS necessarily endorses or recommends Busy. Busy can be freely downloaded, provided that one agrees to the License Agreement. Absolutely no warranty is given.

The Busy programming system has been designed by Tom Aldenberg:

Project Executive Summary 

The next pdf-file summarizes the aim and tools of the project of Probabilistic Uncertainty Analysis in Environmental Risk Assessment of Chemicals: Executive Summary.

Introductory Slides on Risk Assessment of Chemicals

In this slide presentation held at the 7th CEFIC/ LRi Members Workshop in Brussels (November 2005), an introduction is given to recent insights into the relationships between the Hazard Quotient, or Risk Characterisation Ratio as it is called in the EU, and more advanced ways of calculating the Expected Risk of a substance to biological species, as summarized by a so-called Species Sensitivity Distribution (SSD): CEFIC/ LRi Presentation.

The assessment of the entire Risk Distribution, of which the Expected Risk is the mean value, has also been studied recently in the EUFRAM project: EUFRAM.

Busy Package, Notebooks and Documents 

Mathematically-oriented documents supporting methods in Busy can be found at the Documents page of this site. The Busy Package can be downloaded from the Package page, and supporting Mathematica Notebooks can be found at the Notebooks page.

BusyFoundation

Maintenance of Busy and Busy-related software, as well as this BusyMath site, is managed by the non-profit BusyFoundation that is independent of any other organization. The BusyFoundation is directed towards the further development and dissemination of mathematically-oriented probabilistic analyses and (Bayesian) statistical risk methodologies. You can reach the BusyFoundation at the address below.

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