Computer trading and systemic risk: a nuclear perspective

Financial markets have evolved to become complex adaptive systems highly reliant on the communication speeds and processing power afforded by digital systems. Their failure could cause severe disruption to the provision of financial services and possibly the wider economy. In this study we consider whether a perspective from the nuclear industry can provide additional insights

Multi-axis transient vibration testing of space objects: Test philosophy, test facility, and control strategy

IABG has been using various servohydraulic test facilities for many years for the reproduction of service loads and environmental loads on all kinds of test objects. For more than 15 years, a multi-axis vibration test facility has been under service, originally designed for earthquake simulation but being upgraded to the demands of space testing. First tests with the DFS/STM showed good reproduction accuracy and demonstrated the feasibility of transient vibration testing of space objects on a multi-axis hydraulic shaker. An approach to structural qualification is possible by using this test philosophy. It will be outlined and its obvious advantages over the state-of-the-art single-axis test will be demonstrated by example results. The new test technique has some special requirements to the test facility exceeding those of earthquake testing. Most important is the high reproduction accuracy demanded for a sophisticated control system. The state-of-the-art approach of analog closed-loop control circuits for each actuator combined with a static decoupling network and an off-line iterative waveform control is not able to meet all the demands. Therefore, the future over-all control system is implemented as hierarchical full digital closed-loop system on a highly parallel transputer network. The innermost layer is the digital actuator controller, the second one is the MDOF-control of the table movement. The outermost layer would be the off-line iterative waveform control, which is dedicated only to deal with the interaction of test table and test object or non-linear effects. The outline of the system will be presented

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

European White Book on Real-Time Power Hardware in the Loop Testing : DERlab Report No. R- 005.0

The European White Book on Real-Time-Powerhardware-in-the-Loop testing is intended to serve as a reference document on the future of testing of electrical power equipment, with specifi c focus on the emerging hardware-in-the-loop activities and application thereof within testing facilities and procedures. It will provide an outlook of how this powerful tool can be utilised to support the development, testing and validation of specifi cally DER equipment. It aims to report on international experience gained thus far and provides case studies on developments and specifi c technical issues, such as the hardware/software interface. This white book compliments the already existing series of DERlab European white books, covering topics such as grid-inverters and grid-connected storag

New Techniques for On-line Testing and Fault Mitigation in GPUs

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

Construction safety and digital design: a review

As digital technologies become widely used in designing buildings and infrastructure, questions arise about their impacts on construction safety. This review explores relationships between construction safety and digital design practices with the aim of fostering and directing further research. It surveys state-of-the-art research on databases, virtual reality, geographic information systems, 4D CAD, building information modeling and sensing technologies, finding various digital tools for addressing safety issues in the construction phase, but few tools to support design for construction safety. It also considers a literature on safety critical, digital and design practices that raises a general concern about ‘mindlessness’ in the use of technologies, and has implications for the emerging research agenda around construction safety and digital design. Bringing these strands of literature together suggests new kinds of interventions, such as the development of tools and processes for using digital models to promote mindfulness through multi-party collaboration on safet

Process of designing robust, dependable, safe and secure software for medical devices: Point of care testing device as a case study

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Copyright © 2013 Sivanesan Tulasidas et al. This paper presents a holistic methodology for the design of medical device software, which encompasses of a new way of eliciting requirements, system design process, security design guideline, cloud architecture design, combinatorial testing process and agile project management. The paper uses point of care diagnostics as a case study where the software and hardware must be robust, reliable to provide accurate diagnosis of diseases. As software and software intensive systems are becoming increasingly complex, the impact of failures can lead to significant property damage, or damage to the environment. Within the medical diagnostic device software domain such failures can result in misdiagnosis leading to clinical complications and in some cases death. Software faults can arise due to the interaction among the software, the hardware, third party software and the operating environment. Unanticipated environmental changes and latent coding errors lead to operation faults despite of the fact that usually a significant effort has been expended in the design, verification and validation of the software system. It is becoming increasingly more apparent that one needs to adopt different approaches, which will guarantee that a complex software system meets all safety, security, and reliability requirements, in addition to complying with standards such as IEC 62304. There are many initiatives taken to develop safety and security critical systems, at different development phases and in different contexts, ranging from infrastructure design to device design. Different approaches are implemented to design error free software for safety critical systems. By adopting the strategies and processes presented in this paper one can overcome the challenges in developing error free software for medical devices (or safety critical systems).Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund