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

Innovative airport 4.0 condition-based maintenance system for baggage handling DCV systems

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of a recent study conducted with the objective of addressing the problem of failure of baggage carts in the high-speed baggage tunnel at Heathrow Terminal 5 by the development of an innovative condition-based maintenance (CBM) system designed to meet the requirements of 21st century airport systems and Industry 4.0. Design/methodology/approach An empirical experimental approach to this action research was taken to install a vibration condition monitoring pilot test in the north tunnel at Terminal 5. Vibration data were collected over a 6-month period and analysed to find the threshold of good quality tyres and those with worn bearings that needed replacement. The results were compared with existing measures to demonstrate that vibration monitoring could be used as a predictive model for CBM. Findings The findings demonstrated a clear trend of increasing vibration velocity with age and use of the baggage cart wheels caused by wheel mass unbalanced inertia that was transmitted to the tracks as vibration. As a result, preventative maintenance is essential to ensure the smooth running of airport baggage. This research demonstrates that a healthy wheel produces vibration of under 60 mm/s whereas a damaged wheel measures up to 100 mm/s peak to peak velocity and this can be used in real-time condition monitoring to prevent baggage cart failure. It can also run as an autonomous system linked to AI and Industry 4.0 airport logic. Originality/value Whilst vibration monitoring has been used to measure movement in static structures such as bridges and used in rotating machinery such as railway wheels (Tondon and Choudhury, 1999); this is unique as it is the first time it has been applied on a stationary structure (tracks) carrying high-speed rotating machinery (baggage cart wheels). This technique has been patented and proven in the pilot study and is in the process of being rolled out to all Heathrow terminal connection tunnels. It has implications for all other airports worldwide and, with new economic sensors, to other applications that rely on moving conveyor belt

Morpheus Lander Testing Campaign

NASA s Morpheus Project has developed and tested a prototype planetary lander capable of vertical takeoff and landing designed to serve as a testbed for advanced spacecraft technologies. The Morpheus vehicle has successfully performed a set of integrated vehicle test flights including hot-fire and tether tests, ultimately culminating in an un-tethered "free-flight" This development and testing campaign was conducted on-site at the Johnson Space Center (JSC), less than one year after project start. Designed, developed, manufactured and operated in-house by engineers at JSC, the Morpheus Project represents an unprecedented departure from recent NASA programs and projects that traditionally require longer development lifecycles and testing at remote, dedicated testing facilities. This paper documents the integrated testing campaign, including descriptions of test types (hot-fire, tether, and free-flight), test objectives, and the infrastructure of JSC testing facilities. A major focus of the paper will be the fast pace of the project, rapid prototyping, frequent testing, and lessons learned from this departure from the traditional engineering development process at NASA s Johnson Space Center

Audio Conferencing Participant List Manager 3.0

Global Crossing\u27s conferencing division specializes in audio, video, and web-based collaboration. The Conference Participant List Manger 3.0 application framework (LM) allows call center operators to add, modify, delete, and report on audio conference call participant information. LM communicates with the physical conferencing bridge device through an API provided by the bridge vendor. The LM software framework consists of a thin-client, web service, platform service, and a domain definition library. The architecture implemented in the LM software project allows for ease of maintenance and speed of enhancement delivery through the use of software design patterns

Project Morpheus: Morpheus 1.5A Lander Failure Investigation Results

On August 9, 2012 the Morpheus 1.5A vehicle crashed shortly after lift off from the Kennedy Space Center. The loss was limited to the vehicle itself which was pre-declared to be a test failure and not a mishap. The Morpheus project is demonstrating advanced technologies for in space and planetary surface vehicles including: autonomous flight control, landing site hazard identification and safe site selection, relative surface and hazard navigation, precision landing, modular reusable flight software, and high performance, non-toxic, cryogenic liquid Oxygen and liquid Methane integrated main engine and attitude control propulsion system. A comprehensive failure investigation isolated the fault to the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data path to the flight computer. Several improvements have been identified and implemented for the 1.5B and 1.5C vehicles

Service-oriented computing: concepts, characteristics and directions

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is the computing paradigm that utilizes services as fundamental elements for developing applications/solutions. To build the service model, SOC relies on the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), which is a way of reorganizing software applications and infrastructure into a set of interacting services. However, the basic SOA does not address overarching concerns such as management, service orchestration, service transaction management and coordination, security, and other concerns that apply to all components in a services architecture. In this paper we introduce an Extended Service Oriented Architecture that provides separate tiers for composing and coordinating services and for managing services in an open marketplace by employing grid services.

Develop Best Practices for Designing Internal Business Database-Driven Web Applications

When developing using newer technology, it is important for smaller information technology organizations to have universally accepted set of best practices to be able to successfully complete that type of endeavor. How can these universally accepted set of best practices be developed? Conducting research on accepted best practices can build the basis for your theories and assumptions. Next, in the context of your applications, develop an example application in the newer technology to test your theories and assumptions. Build the application like a construction project, the initial design is the blueprint, the database is the foundation and the user interface is the actual building. When you get right down to it, the principals of simplicity, consistency and user interaction are always best practices in developing applications

Optimization Placement for SDN Controller: Bell Canada as a Case Study

The tremendous proliferation of data traffic has been a key motivator for the upgrading of traditional IP networks One new conceptual model that has been developed for redesigning and managing communication networks is software-defined networking (SDN). The main premise behind SDN is the decoupling of the control and data planes, which enables the centralization of the control plane and the programmability of the data plane. Despite these advantages, the use of SDN remains challenging with respect to a number of aspects, such as finding optimal locations for SDN controllers in a wide area network (WAN) and determining the effective number of controllers. The work presented in this thesis addresses these challenges through two proposed strategies for dealing with the SDN controller placement problem. The Bell Canada WAN was considered as a case study: the network was examined, and the modeled procedures for determining the best location for SDN controllers were applied with the goal of enhancing the quality of service (QoS) and minimizing global latency. The simulations conducted as a means of validating and comparing the performance of the two models produced consistent results

Retrofitting Autonomic Capabilities onto Legacy Systems

Autonomic computing - self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimizing applications, systems and networks - is a promising solution to ever-increasing system complexity and the spiraling costs of human management as systems scale to global proportions. Most results to date, however, suggest ways to architect new software constructed from the ground up as autonomic systems, whereas in the real world organizations continue to use stovepipe legacy systems and/or build 'systems of systems' that draw from a gamut of disparate technologies from numerous vendors. Our goal is to retrofit autonomic computing onto such systems, externally, without any need to understand, modify or even recompile the target system's code. We present an autonomic infrastructure that operates similarly to active middleware, to explicitly add autonomic services to pre-existing systems via continual monitoring and a feedback loop that performs, as needed, reconfiguration and/or repair. Our lightweight design and separation of concerns enables easy adoption of individual components, independent of the rest of the full infrastructure, for use with a large variety of target systems. This work has been validated by several case studies spanning multiple application domains