Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India

Quantification of plausibility cross-checks in safety related control system architecture design for automotive applications

When designing safety critical systems for automotive applications it is imperative that the chosen architecture can fulfil the designated safety goals. One significant aspect of this is proving architectural metrics are satisfied. The method developed in this thesis demonstrates, very early in the design process, that a system architecture can be systematically described and analysed to show that the final architectural metric targets for functional safety will be met. The system architecture model proposed can be used to explain a very complex system to other engineers / managers in an easily understood concept diagram, specifically tailored to examine the achievable diagnostic coverage of potential failures in the electrical /electronic system. Once the first architectural model is established, the method analyses architectural metrics in a quantified way, identifies potential weak areas and guides the designer towards additional Plausibility Cross-checks, or, in some cases, completely different architectures to improve the architectural metrics. The metrics can be calculated very quickly in comparison to the level of detail required for the final design. This permits quantified analysis of each candidate architecture allowing an informed decision to be made on which architecture to take through to the final design process. Often, multiple solutions will meet functional requirements, however, only a subset will meet functional safety requirements. The necessity to build safety into products has always been an important aspect of overall system design. This method allows decisions based on justifiable data, early in a project timeline to influence design decisions and ensure that concepts are correct. As demonstrated through examples this is achieved with a high level of confidence

Modelling Event-Based Interactions in Component-Based Architectures for Quantitative System Evaluation

This dissertation thesis presents an approach enabling the modelling and quality-of-service prediction of event-based systems at the architecture-level. Applying a two-step model refinement transformation, the approach integrates platform-specific performance influences of the underlying middleware while enabling the use of different existing analytical and simulation-based prediction techniques