Flexible and Configurable Verification Policies with Omnibus

The three main assertion-based verification approaches are: run-time assertion checking(RAC), extended static checking (ESC) and full formal verification (FFV). Each approach offers a different balance between rigour and ease of use, making them appropriate in different situations. Our goal is to explore the use of these approaches together in a flexible way, enabling an application to be broken down into parts with different reliability requirements and different verification approaches used in each part. We explain the benefits of using the approaches together, present a set of guidelines to avoid potential conflicts and give an overview of how the Omnibus IDE provides support for the full range of assertion-based verification approaches within a single tool

Exploiting thesauri knowledge in medical guideline formalization

Abstract. As in software product lifecycle, the effort spent in maintaining medical knowledge in guidelines can be reduced, if modularization, formalization and tracking of domain knowledge are employed across the guideline development phases. We propose to exploit and combine knowledge templates with medical background knowledge from existing thesauri in order to produce reusable building blocks used in guideline development. These templates enable easier guideline formalization, by describing how chunks of medical knowledge can be combined into more complex ones and how they are linked to a textual representation. By linking our ontology used in guideline formalization with existing thesauri, we can use compilations of thesauri knowledge as building blocks for modeling and maintaining the content of a medical guideline. Our paper investigates whether medical knowledge acquired from several medical thesauri can be molded on a guideline pattern, such that it supports building of executable models of guidelines. Keywords: Linguistic and Control Patterns, Guideline Modelling and Formalization. 1. Objective Evidence-based clinical guidelines, representing disseminated state-of-the-art medical practice, undergo frequent changes due to new research results, and require permanent maintenance, similar to that required in a software project. Existing guideline modelin

A practical guide to promote informatics-driven efficient biotopographic material development

Micro/nano topographic structures have shown great utility in many biomedical areas including cell therapies, tissue engineering, and implantable devices. Computer-assisted informatics methods hold great promise for the design of topographic structures with targeted properties for a specific medical application. To benefit from these methods, researchers and engineers require a highly reusable “one structural parameter – one set of cell responses” database. However, existing confounding factors in topographic cell culture devices seriously impede the acquisition of this kind of data. Through carefully dissecting the confounding factors and their possible reasons for emergence, we developed corresponding guideline requirements for topographic cell culture device development to remove or control the influence of such factors. Based on these requirements, we then suggested potential strategies to meet them. In this work, we also experimentally demonstrated a topographic cell culture device with controlled confounding factors based on these guideline requirements and corresponding strategies. A “guideline for the development of topographic cell culture devices” was summarized to instruct researchers to develop topographic cell culture devices with the confounding factors removed or well controlled. This guideline aims to promote the establishment of a highly reusable “one structural parameter – one set of cell responses” database that could facilitate the application of informatics methods, such as artificial intelligence, in the rational design of future biotopographic structures with high efficacy

Detecting behavioral conflicts among crosscutting concerns

Aspects have been successfully promoted as a means to improve the modularization of software in the presence of crosscutting concerns. Within the Ideals project, aspects have been shown to be valuable for improving the modularization of idioms (see also Chapter 1). The so-called aspect interference problem is considered to be one of the remaining challenges of aspect-oriented software development: aspects may interfere with the behavior of the base code or other aspects. Especially interference among aspects is difficult to prevent, as this may be caused solely by the composition of aspects that behave correctly in isolation. A typical situation where this may occur is when multiple advices are applied at the same, or shared, join point. In this chapter we explain the problem of behavioral conflicts among aspects at shared join points, illustrated by aspects that represent idioms: Parameter checking and Error propagation. We present an approach for the detection of behavioral conflicts that is based on a novel abstraction model for representing the behavior of advice. The approach employs a set of conflict detection rules which can be used to detect both generic conflicts as well as domain or application specific conflicts. One of the benefits of the approach is that it neither requires the application programmers to deal with the conflict models, nor does it require a background in formal methods for the aspect programmers

An empirical study of aspect-oriented metrics

Metrics for aspect-oriented software have been proposed and used to investigate the benefits and the disadvantages of crosscutting concerns modularisation. Some of these metrics have not been rigorously defined nor analytically evaluated. Also, there are few empirical data showing typical values of these metrics in aspect-oriented software. In this paper, we provide rigorous definitions, usage guidelines, analytical evaluation, and empirical data from ten open source projects, determining the value of six metrics for aspect-oriented software (lines of code, weighted operations in module, depth of inheritance tree, number of children, crosscutting degree of an aspect, and coupling on advice execution). We discuss how each of these metrics can be used to identify shortcomings in existing aspect-oriented software. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.CNPq [140046/06-2]; Project CNPQ-PROSUL [490478/06-9]; Capes-Grices [2051-05-2]; FAPERGS [10/0470-1]; FCT MCTESinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Tolerance of Pseudomonas aeruginosa in in vitro biofilms to high level peracetic acid disinfection

Biofilm has been suggested as a cause of disinfection failures in flexible endoscopes where no lapses in the decontamination procedure can be identified. To test this theory, the activity of peracetic acid (PAA), one of the commonly used disinfectants in the reprocessing of flexible endoscopes, was evaluated against both planktonic and sessile communities of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. To investigate the ability of P. aeruginosa biofilm to survive high level PAA disinfection. The susceptibility of planktonic cells of P. aeruginosa and biofilms 24, 48, 96 and 192 h old to PAA was evaluated by estimating their viability using resazurin viability and plate count methods. The biomass of the P. aeruginosa biofilms was also quantified using crystal violet assay. Planktonic cells of P. aeruginosa were treated with 5 - 30 ppm concentration of PAA in the presence of 3.0 g/L of Bovine serum albumin (BSA) for 5 min. Biofilms of P. aeruginosa were also treated with various PAA concentrations (100 - 3000 ppm) for 5 min. Planktonic cells of P. aeruginosa were eradicated by 20 ppm of PAA, whereas biofilms showed an age dependent tolerance to PAA, and 96 h old biofilm was only eradicated at PAA concentration of 2500 ppm. 96 h old P. aeruginosa biofilm survives 5 min treatment with 2000 ppm of PAA, which is the working concentration used in some endoscope washer disinfectors. This implies that disinfection failure of flexible endoscopes could occur when biofilms are allowed to build up in the lumens of endoscopes