FRAM for systemic accident analysis: a matrix representation of functional resonance

Due to the inherent complexity of nowadays Air Traffic Management (ATM) system, standard methods looking at an event as a linear sequence of failures might become inappropriate. For this purpose, adopting a systemic perspective, the Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) originally developed by Hollnagel, helps identifying non-linear combinations of events and interrelationships. This paper aims to enhance the strength of FRAM-based accident analyses, discussing the Resilience Analysis Matrix (RAM), a user-friendly tool that supports the analyst during the analysis, in order to reduce the complexity of representation of FRAM. The RAM offers a two dimensional representation which highlights systematically connections among couplings, and thus even highly connected group of couplings. As an illustrative case study, this paper develops a systemic accident analysis for the runway incursion happened in February 1991 at LAX airport, involving SkyWest Flight 5569 and USAir Flight 1493. FRAM confirms itself a powerful method to characterize the variability of the operational scenario, identifying the dynamic couplings with a critical role during the event and helping discussing the systemic effects of variability at different level of analysis

European Union

The European Community has had a decidedly significant impact upon the legal systems of the Member States. It was established in 1957 by the Treaty of Rome, the main objectives being to develop stability throughout Europe by means of encouraging a closer union between member states. It has evolved a long way since having developed its own institutions and an autonomous legal system, with laws that bind each member state ultimately enabling it to regulate the rights and obligations of its members. It achieves this primarily through Treaties, a primary form of EC legislation that forms the basis of all other European Law. However the effect of EC treaties is unlike that of any other international agreement as the latter bind only states at an intergovernmental level and do not of themselves give rise to rights or interests which the citizens of the states can have enforced before their own national courts even if they are designed for the protection of individuals. Although the text of EC treaties does not indicate that their provisions will be any different, the ECJ has taken its own view as to the nature and effect of treaties known as the doctrine of ‘direct effect.’ This jurisprudential concept means that individuals are able to derive rights directly from community law, which can be enforced in their own national courts. It is a private species of enforcement, placing control in the hands of ordinary individuals as distinct from the public enforcement mechanism of community law as contained in Article 226 of the Treaty of Rome which enabled the Commission to bring proceedings against member states for breaches. This system was deficient in many ways as, not only was it unable to cope with the increasing work load and had insufficient remedies, it was political in nature. Direct effect, on the other hand, has allowed individuals to play a role and has potentially brought the community into the lives of every citizen. However despite its significance, it is important to put it into context of the many types of community law, not all of which entail direct effect or which can only be directly effective in certain circumstances, such as directives

Influence of the Tunnel Shape on Shotcrete Lining Stresses

Tunnel excavation is frequently carried out in rock masses by the drill and blast method and the final shape of the tunnel boundary can be irregular due to overbreaks. In order to investigate the effects of overbreaks a study of the effect of tunnel boundary irregularity has been carried out. This is done developing a computational tool able to take into account fuzzy variables (i.e., thickness of the beams of the bedded spring approach used for the model). The obtained results show that irregularity effects should be considered when a shotcrete lining is used as the final tunnel lining (for the case where the tunneling procedure does not permit a smooth surface to be obtained). This is crucial to obtain a durable linin

European Union

The European Community has had a decidedly significant impact upon the legal systems of the Member States. It was established in 1957 by the Treaty of Rome, the main objectives being to develop stability throughout Europe by means of encouraging a closer union between member states. It has evolved a long way since having developed its own institutions and an autonomous legal system, with laws that bind each member state ultimately enabling it to regulate the rights and obligations of its members. It achieves this primarily through Treaties, a primary form of EC legislation that forms the basis of all other European Law. However the effect of EC treaties is unlike that of any other international agreement as the latter bind only states at an intergovernmental level and do not of themselves give rise to rights or interests which the citizens of the states can have enforced before their own national courts even if they are designed for the protection of individuals. Although the text of EC treaties does not indicate that their provisions will be any different, the ECJ has taken its own view as to the nature and effect of treaties known as the doctrine of ‘direct effect.’ This jurisprudential concept means that individuals are able to derive rights directly from community law, which can be enforced in their own national courts. It is a private species of enforcement, placing control in the hands of ordinary individuals as distinct from the public enforcement mechanism of community law as contained in Article 226 of the Treaty of Rome which enabled the Commission to bring proceedings against member states for breaches. This system was deficient in many ways as, not only was it unable to cope with the increasing work load and had insufficient remedies, it was political in nature. Direct effect, on the other hand, has allowed individuals to play a role and has potentially brought the community into the lives of every citizen. However despite its significance, it is important to put it into context of the many types of community law, not all of which entail direct effect or which can only be directly effective in certain circumstances, such as directives.European Community, European Law, EC treaties, Direct effect, directives.

Predictive intelligence to the edge through approximate collaborative context reasoning

We focus on Internet of Things (IoT) environments where a network of sensing and computing devices are responsible to locally process contextual data, reason and collaboratively infer the appearance of a specific phenomenon (event). Pushing processing and knowledge inference to the edge of the IoT network allows the complexity of the event reasoning process to be distributed into many manageable pieces and to be physically located at the source of the contextual information. This enables a huge amount of rich data streams to be processed in real time that would be prohibitively complex and costly to deliver on a traditional centralized Cloud system. We propose a lightweight, energy-efficient, distributed, adaptive, multiple-context perspective event reasoning model under uncertainty on each IoT device (sensor/actuator). Each device senses and processes context data and infers events based on different local context perspectives: (i) expert knowledge on event representation, (ii) outliers inference, and (iii) deviation from locally predicted context. Such novel approximate reasoning paradigm is achieved through a contextualized, collaborative belief-driven clustering process, where clusters of devices are formed according to their belief on the presence of events. Our distributed and federated intelligence model efficiently identifies any localized abnormality on the contextual data in light of event reasoning through aggregating local degrees of belief, updates, and adjusts its knowledge to contextual data outliers and novelty detection. We provide comprehensive experimental and comparison assessment of our model over real contextual data with other localized and centralized event detection models and show the benefits stemmed from its adoption by achieving up to three orders of magnitude less energy consumption and high quality of inference

Automatic message annotation and semantic interface for context aware mobile computing

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Docter of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.In this thesis, the concept of mobile messaging awareness has been investigated by designing and implementing a framework which is able to annotate the short text messages with context ontology for semantic reasoning inference and classification purposes. The annotated metadata of text message keywords are identified and annotated with concepts, entities and knowledge that drawn from ontology without the need of learning process and the proposed framework supports semantic reasoning based messages awareness for categorization purposes. The first stage of the research is developing the framework of facilitating mobile communication with short text annotated messages (SAMS), which facilitates annotating short text message with part of speech tags augmented with an internal and external metadata. In the SAMS framework the annotation process is carried out automatically at the time of composing a message. The obtained metadata is collected from the device’s file system and the message header information which is then accumulated with the message’s tagged keywords to form an XML file, simultaneously. The significance of annotation process is to assist the proposed framework during the search and retrieval processes to identify the tagged keywords and The Semantic Web Technologies are utilised to improve the reasoning mechanism. Later, the proposed framework is further improved “Contextual Ontology based Short Text Messages reasoning (SOIM)”. SOIM further enhances the search capabilities of SAMS by adopting short text message annotation and semantic reasoning capabilities with domain ontology as Domain ontology is modeled into set of ontological knowledge modules that capture features of contextual entities and features of particular event or situation. Fundamentally, the framework SOIM relies on the hierarchical semantic distance to compute an approximated match degree of new set of relevant keywords to their corresponding abstract class in the domain ontology. Adopting contextual ontology leverages the framework performance to enhance the text comprehension and message categorization. Fuzzy Sets and Rough Sets theory have been integrated with SOIM to improve the inference capabilities and system efficiency. Since SOIM is based on the degree of similarity to choose the matched pattern to the message, the issue of choosing the best-retrieved pattern has arisen during the stage of decision-making. Fuzzy reasoning classifier based rules that adopt the Fuzzy Set theory for decision making have been applied on top of SOIM framework in order to increase the accuracy of the classification process with clearer decision. The issue of uncertainty in the system has been addressed by utilising the Rough Sets theory, in which the irrelevant and indecisive properties which affect the framework efficiency negatively have been ignored during the matching process.The Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research (IRAQ

ISIPTA'07: Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium on Imprecise Probability: Theories and Applications

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