Fault-Tolerance by Graceful Degradation for Car Platoons

The key advantage of autonomous car platoons are their short inter-vehicle distances that increase traffic flow and reduce fuel consumption. However, this is challenging for operational and functional safety. If a failure occurs, the affected vehicles cannot suddenly stop driving but instead should continue their operation with reduced performance until a safe state can be reached or, in the case of temporal failures, full functionality can be guaranteed again. To achieve this degradation, platoon members have to be able to compensate sensor and communication failures and have to adjust their inter-vehicle distances to ensure safety. In this work, we describe a systematic design of degradation cascades for sensor and communication failures in autonomous car platoons using the example of an autonomous model car. We describe our systematic design method, the resulting degradation modes, and formulate contracts for each degradation level. We model and test our resulting degradation controller in Simulink/Stateflow

Cascades of Violence

War and crime are cascade phenomena. War cascades across space and time to more war; crime to more crime; crime cascades to war; and war to crime. As a result, war and crime become complex phenomena. That does not mean we cannot understand how to prevent crime and war simultaneously. This book shows, for example, how a cascade analysis leads to an understanding of how refugee camps are nodes of both targeted attack and targeted recruitment into violence. Hence, humanitarian prevention also must target such nodes of risk. This book shows how nonviolence and nondomination can also be made to cascade, shunting cascades of violence into reverse. Complexity theory implies a conclusion that the pursuit of strategies for preventing crime and war is less important than understanding meta strategies. These are meta strategies for how to sequence and escalate many redundant prevention strategies. These themes were explored across seven South Asian societies during eight years of fieldwork

Information technology and military performance

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 519-544).Militaries have long been eager to adopt the latest technology (IT) in a quest to improve knowledge of and control over the battlefield. At the same time, uncertainty and confusion have remained prominent in actual experience of war. IT usage sometimes improves knowledge, but it sometimes contributes to tactical blunders and misplaced hubris. As militaries invest intensively in IT, they also tend to develop larger headquarters staffs, depend more heavily on planning and intelligence, and employ a larger percentage of personnel in knowledge work rather than physical combat. Both optimists and pessimists about the so-called "revolution in military affairs" have tended to overlook the ways in which IT is profoundly and ambiguously embedded in everyday organizational life. Technocrats embrace IT to "lift the fog of war," but IT often becomes a source of breakdowns, misperception, and politicization. To describe the conditions under which IT usage improves or degrades organizational performance, this dissertation develops the notion of information friction, an aggregate measure of the intensity of organizational struggle to coordinate IT with the operational environment. It articulates hypotheses about how the structure of the external battlefield, internal bureaucratic politics, and patterns of human-computer interaction can either exacerbate or relieve friction, which thus degrades or improves performance. Technological determinism alone cannot account for the increasing complexity and variable performances of information phenomena. Information friction theory is empirically grounded in a participant-observation study of U.S. special operations in Iraq from 2007 to 2008. To test the external validity of insights gained through fieldwork in Iraq, an historical study of the 1940 Battle of Britain examines IT usage in a totally different structural, organizational, and technological context.(cont.) These paired cases show that high information friction, and thus degraded performance, can arise with sophisticated IT, while lower friction and impressive performance can occur with far less sophisticated networks. The social context, not just the quality of technology, makes all the difference. Many shorter examples from recent military history are included to illustrate concepts. This project should be of broad interest to students of organizational knowledge, IT, and military effectiveness.by Jon Randall Lindsay.Ph.D

Writing to Think

The purpose of this volume is to honor the work and thought of Robert C. Rubel, Captain, U.S. Navy (Ret.). Since his retirement from the Navy, Robert (a.k.a. “Barney”) Rubel has held senior positions in the Center for Naval Warfare Studies (CNWS), in the Naval War College, in Newport, Rhode Island—first as deputy dean, then as chairman of the War Gaming Department, and finally (since 2006) as dean. During this period, not only has he presided effectively over a complex (and in many ways anomalous) institution, but he has found the time to create a substantial body of published writings about naval warfare and war, or strategy generally. In the process, he has quietly established himself as one of the Navy’s most innovative and wide-ranging thinkers.https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/usnwc-newport-papers/1040/thumbnail.jp

From Spectrum to Beam in Iraq Organizational Adaptation: Combat, Stability, and Beyond

On 20 March 2003, the United States Army participated in the invasion of Iraq as part of Operation IRAQI FREEDOM (OIF). Despite the announcement from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln of the end of major combat operations on 1 May 2003, the U.S. Army is still conducting maneuvers and missions throughout the cities and desert plains of Iraq. Fundamentally, the U.S. Army was incapable of translating initial combat success into the accomplishment of strategic objectives and political victory. What emerged from tactical and operational victories against Iraqi forces was not a stable democratic peace; instead, Iraq plunged into a long and complex insurgency that fused the spectrum of conflict into a single beam where the full range of military operations had to be performed nearly simultaneously.Combating and defeating this insurgency required a capacity for conducting simultaneous full spectrum operations in a competitive environment populated by highly adaptive foes. But the U.S. Army was unprepared for this task. A Cycle of Mutual Adaptation between hierarchical and vertically integrated organizations and networked and horizontally integrated competitors ensued. The latter was predisposed to organizational adaptation and conducting networked operations in a decentralized fashion; the former was predisposed to quickly vanquishing threats along prescriptive plans with centralized command and control systems. How this competition unfolded and the implications of this process are the subject of this study.Although the insurgency in Iraq has largely been quelled, the cyclical and competitive process producing this tenuous stability has raised serious questions regarding the efficacy of post-Cold War and post-9/11 strategies, force structures, doctrine, training, and the U.S. Army's organizational capacity for adaptation in light of national interests, strategic requirements, and institutional legacies. This study charts the historical factors contributing to the Cycle of Mutual Adaptation in OIF, analyzes this cycle, gives an assessment of the international security environment in the wake of this conflict, and concludes with policy recommendations for improving the U.S. Army's capacity for organizational adaptation in the 21st Century

Messages of the governors of the territory of Washington to the Legislative assembly, 1854-1889

Gerald W. Williams Collectio

An English translation of the Adab-i-'Alamgiri, the period before the war of succession : being the letters of Prince Muhammad Aurangzib Bahadur to Muhammad Shihabu 'd-din Shah Jahan Sahib-i-Qiran-i-Sani, Emperor of Hindustan

This thesis, the first part of a projected English translation of the whole of the Adab-i-1Alamgiri, contains the letters written by Prince Aurangzib to his father Shah Jahan between the middle of 1650, when he was viceroy of Multan, and the beginning of 1656, when he began his campaign against Golconda. The translation is preceded by a brief introduction sketching the early life and character of Aurangzib, the style in which the letters are written and the reason for its adoption, and a short view of the prevailing and contradictory opinions upon Aurangzib. His religious policy when Emperor is briefly referred to; but with the conclusion that the Adab-i-1Alamgiri offers no direct evidence that he had framed any part of it in his mind while yet Prince. Indeed, no sign of any particular Islamic piety can be seen in the letters, and the structure of the state set up by Akbar seems to enjoy Aurangzib's entire support. Its external incidents are accepted by Aurangzib with equanimity, and apparent enthusiasm; even those which some modern orthodox claim to be abhorrent to Islam. The value of the letters lies in two main fields; illustration and explanation of narrative history, and elucidation of details of administration and management of the Mughul empire, and the careers and character of its officers. The great but wasted effort to recapture Qandahar in 1652; the embellishment of the palace at Shahjahanabad, and the repair and maintenance of the "luminous tomb" of Mumtaz Mahal at Agra; the entire reconstruction of the assessment of the revenue of the Mughul Deccan; the enticement of Mir Jumla to leave his hazardous hopes of further greatness in Golconda, and perhaps independent dominion, and accept the Mughul service; these are the most interesting subjects of the letters. But almost no letter is without other lesser details, and these, too, can be of the first importance. Each letter is introduced by a note, setting out the theme, and commenting generally. Full notes are provided to the translation, containing textual criticism, comments or explanations relating to particular words, topographical elucidations, biographical material upon the men mentioned, references to contemporary documents wherever possible, and remakrs upon the importance of the leading events. Because the notes are so copious, the introduction is brief and general. The bibliography is select, confined only to books actually consulted. Those of consequence in the understanding of the leading schools of thought upon Aurangzib have been discussed in the introduction. There is a full table of contents; a note on chronology; and an annotated table of the dates on which the letters were written