39,081 research outputs found
Transportation Capital Programming in Massachusetts
Recommends implementing an explicit, policy-driven framework and criteria for prioritizing transportation capital spending at the Massachusetts Highway Department and the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. Outlines benchmarks and key elements
The Impact of Human Error in the Use of Agricultural Tractors: A Case Study Research in Vineyard Cultivation in Italy
Recently, standards and regulations concerning occupational safety have become more and more rigorous. Nevertheless, the number of accidents and victims has not decreased significantly, as reported by official statistics. In Italy, the agricultural sector is certainly one of the most affected by this situation, especially taking into account the occurrence of serious injuries and fatalities related to the use of tractors. The main reasons for such a situation can be ascribed to the peculiarities of agricultural operations. Therefore, when analyzing the root causes of agricultural accidents, a user-centered approach is needed in order to make the development of health and safety interventions easier and more effective. Based on this, the present paper proposes a practical case study research focused on integrating the factor of human error into the risk assessment procedures of agricultural activities in vineyard cultivation. Such an approach allowed us to consider the impact of human errorwhile performing work activities (e.g., the use of a tractor)on hazards and related hazardous events in a thorough manner. The proposed approach represents a novelty in the sector of the safety assessment of agricultural activities, providing a first valuable basis for further analysis and implementation by researchers and practitioners
Local Government planning: from data to action
Decentralisation is built on the assu
mption that decentralized governme
nts are more knowledgeable about
and responsive to the needs of the poor. This article ex
amines the role of local governments in Kenya and the
ways in which they make their decisions about the allocation of resources to deliver water and sanitation
services. Two major challenges are identified: i) lack of
data that accurately reveal
which areas are most in
need; and ii) inadequate instruments for planning, monitoring and evaluation. In tackling previous
shortcomings, this study i) adopts a new specific appr
oach for data collection at community level, and ii)
exploits these data through simple composite indicator
s as policy tools that assist local government with
decision-making. It concludes that accurate and compre
hensive data are the basis of effective targeting and
prioritization, which are fundamental to sector planning.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
Exploiting a Goal-Decomposition Technique to Prioritize Non-functional Requirements
Business stakeholders need to have clear and realistic goals if they want to meet commitments in application development. As a consequence, at early stages they prioritize requirements. However, requirements do change. The effect of change forces the stakeholders to balance alternatives and reprioritize requirements accordingly. In this paper we discuss the problem of priorities to non-functional requirements subjected to change. We, then, propose an approach to help smooth the impact of such changes. Our approach favors the translation of nonoperational specifications into operational definitions that can be evaluated once the system is developed. It uses the goal-question-metric method as the major support to decompose non-operational specifications into operational ones. We claim that the effort invested in operationalizing NFRs helps dealing with changing requirements during system development. Based on\ud
this transformation and in our experience, we provide guidelines to prioritize volatile non-functional requirements
Datacenter Traffic Control: Understanding Techniques and Trade-offs
Datacenters provide cost-effective and flexible access to scalable compute
and storage resources necessary for today's cloud computing needs. A typical
datacenter is made up of thousands of servers connected with a large network
and usually managed by one operator. To provide quality access to the variety
of applications and services hosted on datacenters and maximize performance, it
deems necessary to use datacenter networks effectively and efficiently.
Datacenter traffic is often a mix of several classes with different priorities
and requirements. This includes user-generated interactive traffic, traffic
with deadlines, and long-running traffic. To this end, custom transport
protocols and traffic management techniques have been developed to improve
datacenter network performance.
In this tutorial paper, we review the general architecture of datacenter
networks, various topologies proposed for them, their traffic properties,
general traffic control challenges in datacenters and general traffic control
objectives. The purpose of this paper is to bring out the important
characteristics of traffic control in datacenters and not to survey all
existing solutions (as it is virtually impossible due to massive body of
existing research). We hope to provide readers with a wide range of options and
factors while considering a variety of traffic control mechanisms. We discuss
various characteristics of datacenter traffic control including management
schemes, transmission control, traffic shaping, prioritization, load balancing,
multipathing, and traffic scheduling. Next, we point to several open challenges
as well as new and interesting networking paradigms. At the end of this paper,
we briefly review inter-datacenter networks that connect geographically
dispersed datacenters which have been receiving increasing attention recently
and pose interesting and novel research problems.Comment: Accepted for Publication in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial
Towards a scope management of non-functional requirements in requirements engineering
Getting business stakeholders’ goals formulated clearly and project scope defined realistically increases the chance of success for any application development process. As a consequence, stakeholders at early project stages acquire as much as possible knowledge about the requirements, their risk estimates and their prioritization. Current industrial practice suggests that in most software projects this scope assessment is performed on the user’s functional requirements (FRs), while the non-functional requirements (NFRs) remain, by and large, ignored. However, the increasing software complexity and competition in the software industry has highlighted the need to consider NFRs as an integral part of software modeling and development. This paper contributes towards harmonizing the need to build the functional behavior of a system with the need to model the associated NFRs while maintaining a scope management for NFRs. The paper presents a systematic and precisely defined model towards an early integration of NFRs within the requirements engineering (RE). Early experiences with the model indicate its ability to facilitate the process of acquiring the knowledge on the priority and risk of NFRs
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