1998 NASA-ASEE-Stanford Summer Faculty Fellowship Program

This report presents the essential features and highlights of the 1998 Summer Faculty Fellowship Program at Ames Research Center and Dryden Flight Research Center in a comprehensive and concise form. Summary reports describing the fellows' technical accomplishments are enclosed in the attached technical report. The proposal for the 1999 NASA-ASEE-Stanford Summer Faculty Fellowship Program is being submitted under separate cover. Of the 31 participating fellows, 27 were at Ames and 4 were at Dryden. The Program's central feature is the active participation by each fellow in one of the key technical activities currently under way at either the NASA Ames Research Center or the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center. The research topic is carefully chosen in advance to satisfy the criteria of: (1) importance to NASA, (2) high technical level, and (3) a good match to the interests, ability, and experience of the fellow, with the implied possibility of NASA-supported follow-on work at the fellow's home institution. Other features of the Summer Faculty Fellowship Program include participation by the fellows in workshops and seminars at Stanford, the Ames Research Center, and other off-site locations. These enrichment programs take place either directly or remotely, via the Stanford Center for Professional Development, and also involve specific interactions between fellows and Stanford faculty on technical and other academic subjects. A few, brief remarks are in order to summarize the fellows' opinions of the summer program. It is noteworthy that 90% of the fellows gave the NASA-Ames/Dryden- Stanford program an "excellent" rating and the remaining 10%, "good." Also, 100% would recommend the program to their colleagues as an effective means of furthering their professional development as teachers and researchers. Last, but not least, 87% of the fellows stated that a continuing research relationship with their NASA colleagues' organization probably would be maintained. Therefore, the NASA-ASEE- Ames/Dryden-Stanford Program has met its goals very well and every effort will be made to continue to do so in the future

Fiabilité opérationnelle des avoins (Approche basée sur les modèles et cas d'étude)

Lors de la conception des avions, il est courant que les constructeurs évaluent la sûreté de fonctionnement en utilisant des modèles stochastiques, mais l'évaluation de la fiabilité opérationnelle à l aide de modèles en ligne, pendant la réalisation des missions, reste rarement effectuée. Souvent, l'évaluation stochastique concerne la sécurité des avions. Cette thèse porte sur la modélisation de la fiabilité opérationnelle des avions, pour aider à la planification des activités de maintenance et des missions, ainsi qu à la bonne réalisation de ces dernières. Nous avons développé une approche de modélisation, basée sur un méta-modèle qui sert de base i) de structuration des informations nécessaires à l évaluation de la fiabilité opérationnelle d un avion et ii) pour la construction de modèles stochastiques pouvant être mis à jour dynamiquement. La mise à jour concerne l'état courant des systèmes avion, un profil de mission et les moyens de maintenance disponibles dans les diverses escales incluses dans le profil de la mission. L'objectif est de permettre l'évaluation de la fiabilité opérationnelle en ligne. Deux cas d études, basés sur des sous-systèmes avion, sont considérés à titre d'illustration. Nous présentons des exemples de résultats qui montrent le rôle important de l évaluation de la fiabilité opérationnelle pendant une mission d avionDependability assessment, by system manufacturer, during aircraft design, based on stochastic modeling, is of common practice, but model based operational dependability assessment online, during missions' achievement, is seldom done. Usually, the stochastic assessment addresses aircraft safety.This thesis addresses aircraft operational dependability modeling to support mission and maintenance planning, as well as the achievement of the missions. We develop a modeling approach, based on a meta-model that is used as a basis i) to structure the information needed to assess aircraft operational reliability and ii) to build a stochastic model that can be updated dynamically. The update concerns the current state of the aircraft system, a mission profile and the maintenance facilities available at the flight stop locations involved in the mission. The aim is to enable operational reliability assessment online. Two case studies, based on aircraft subsystems, are considered for illustration. We present examples of evaluation results that show the valuable role of operational dependability assessment during aircraft missionTOULOUSE-INSA-Bib. electronique (315559905) / SudocSudocFranceF

Resilience-Building Technologies: State of Knowledge -- ReSIST NoE Deliverable D12

This document is the first product of work package WP2, "Resilience-building and -scaling technologies", in the programme of jointly executed research (JER) of the ReSIST Network of Excellenc

Creativity in Art Music Composition

This thesis investigates what it means to call art music composition creative. Research into the concept of creativity has taken place mostly in science-based disciplines and is reviewed for its relevance. Discussions on what may constitute the foundations of creativity in music are conducted. Musical creativity is not bounded by normativity, consistency, truth-boundedness, optimization or effability for its recognition and is largely aesthetic. Current research methods are mainly explanatory, objective and analytic, and necessarily fall short in understanding musical creativity. It thereby undermines the validity of these methods when used to justify one’s understanding. The undermining invariably takes place by disrupting logical and reasonable expectations. The significance of this research is that it attempts to find and describe essences of the subject matter, the effect of which actually disrupts grounds for finding essences in the first place. It no longer seeks to explain creativity in musical composition. This thesis argues that creativity in art music composition is better understood through philosophical phenomenology than through analysis, where evidence as experience and description naturally includes aesthetic considerations. What composers say is made potentially helpful to understand their musical creativity. They are approached using an interview technique where problem solving, truth-boundedness, optimization and reasonable causality are set aside as essential precepts. Responses are interpreted intuitively to reveal essences present. Trains of thought that reveal essential properties in interview content are intuited. They show that communication is a prominent essence to motivation for being creative. Perceptual attitudes and experiences are often provoked by disruption to sonic expectation. Creativity in art music composition then becomes a generic initial step in the way it communicates and inspires through playing with musical expectation

The Essence of Software Engineering

Software Engineering; Software Development; Software Processes; Software Architectures; Software Managemen

Coupled model transformations for QoS enabled component-based software design

This thesis presents the Palladio Component Model and its accompanying transformations for component-based software design with predictable performance attributes. The use of transformations results in a deterministic relationship between the model and its implementation. The introduced Coupled Transformations method uses this relationship to include implementation details into predictions to get better predictions. The approach is validated in several case studies showing the increased accuracy

Evaluating Architectural Safeguards for Uncertain AI Black-Box Components

Although tremendous progress has been made in Artificial Intelligence (AI), it entails new challenges. The growing complexity of learning tasks requires more complex AI components, which increasingly exhibit unreliable behaviour. In this book, we present a model-driven approach to model architectural safeguards for AI components and analyse their effect on the overall system reliability

RFID Technology in Intelligent Tracking Systems in Construction Waste Logistics Using Optimisation Techniques

Construction waste disposal is an urgent issue for protecting our environment. This paper proposes a waste management system and illustrates the work process using plasterboard waste as an example, which creates a hazardous gas when land filled with household waste, and for which the recycling rate is less than 10% in the UK. The proposed system integrates RFID technology, Rule-Based Reasoning, Ant Colony optimization and knowledge technology for auditing and tracking plasterboard waste, guiding the operation staff, arranging vehicles, schedule planning, and also provides evidence to verify its disposal. It h relies on RFID equipment for collecting logistical data and uses digital imaging equipment to give further evidence; the reasoning core in the third layer is responsible for generating schedules and route plans and guidance, and the last layer delivers the result to inform users. The paper firstly introduces the current plasterboard disposal situation and addresses the logistical problem that is now the main barrier to a higher recycling rate, followed by discussion of the proposed system in terms of both system level structure and process structure. And finally, an example scenario will be given to illustrate the system’s utilization