Optimal scheduling of reliability development activities

Probabilistic Safety Assessment and Management is a collection of papers presented at the PSAM 7 - ESREL '04 Conference in June 2004. The joint Conference provided a forum for the presentation of the latest developments in methodology and application of probabilistic and reliability methods in various industries. Innovations in methodology as well as practical applications in the areas of probabilistic safety assessment and of reliability analysis are presented in this six volume set. The aim of these applications is the optimisation of technological systems and processes from the perspective of a risk-informed safety management while also taking economic and environmental aspects into account. The joint Conference in particular achieved an enhanced communication, the sharing of experience and integration of approaches not only among the various industries but also on a truly global basis by bringing together leading experts from all over the world. Over the last four decades, contemporary researchers have continuously been working to provide modern societies with a systematic, self-consistent and coherent framework for making decisions on at least one class of risks, those stemming from modern technological applications. Most of the effort has been spent in developing methods and techniques for assessing the dependability of technological systems, and assessing or estimating the levels of safety and associated risks. A wide spectrum of engineering, natural and economic sciences has been involved in this assessment effort. The developments have moved beyond research endeavours, they have been applied and utilised in real socio-technical environments and have become established - while modern technology continues to present new challenges and to raise new questions. Consequently, Probabilistic Safety Assessment and Management covers both well-established practices and open issues in the fields addressed by the Conference, identifying areas where maturity has been reached and those where more development is needed. The papers reflect a wide variety of disciplines, such as principles and theory of reliability and risk analysis, systems modelling and simulation, consequence assessment, human and organisational factors, structural reliability methods, software reliability and safety, insights and lessons from risk studies and management/decision making. A diverse range of application areas are represented including aviation and space, chemical processing, civil engineering, energy, environment, information technology, legal, manufacturing, health care, defence, transportation and waste management

Implementation of food irradiation in Portugal: research, economic and industrial perspectives in a case study – chestnuts preservation

Food irradiation is a process that has been regaining an increasing interest for different food products to increase shelf life, for disinfestation or sterilization, being an alternative processing food technology to meet food safety quality parameters. The development of ionizing radiation applications for industrial purposes in Portugal began near of 1982 with the support of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The research activities carried out in this country have been closely related with the main applications of this technology, namely the sterilization of medical devices and pharmaceuticals and other products’ decontamination. These activities have frequently been followed through by different industries. Recently, a Cobalt-60 research equipment was upgraded and an electron-beam equipment was implemented in order to sustain the R&D. These equipments are located at Nuclear and Technological Institute, in Lisbon-Portugal, where the industrial and R&D activities are developed. The chestnut European variety, Castanea sativa Miller, is a valuable natural resource in Portugal (3% world production, about 30 kton), with high exportation levels (10 kton, representing an income of 12 M€), that has to be postharvest treated to meet the international fitossanitary regulations. Until now, the most common preservation method used was the chemical fumigation with methyl bromide, a toxic agent that is under strictly use according to Montreal Protocol due to the adverse effects on human health and environment. Its application is forbidden by the European Union (EU) since March 2010. Irradiation is a possible feasible alternative to substitute the traditional quarantine chemical fumigation treatment. This food processing technology is regulated by the EU, Directive 1999/2/EC. To validate this process different approaches are needed and, therefore, we established a interdisciplinary research group between Portugal and Spain, with complementary expertises such as agronomy (disinfestation), microbiology (sterilization), food chemistry and engineering (chemical and physical parameters), physics (dosimetry and dose mapping). Studies in simulation based on Monte-Carlo programs are being developed in order to optimize the irradiation geometry for its technological application. Fundamental and applied research is ongoing for different food products (chestnuts disinfestation, wild mushrooms preservation, food irradiation for imunocompromised persons – supported by national and international funds: EU, IAEA) in order to understand the irradiation mechanisms of action and to apply the technology with safety and quality patterns. Moreover, since food irradiation represents an intensive capital investment, its feasibility is only possible for a unit that processes different food products

Socially-distributed cognition and cognitive architectures: towards an ACT-R-based cognitive social simulation capability

ACT-R is one of the most widely used cognitive architectures, and it has been used to model hundreds of phenomena described in the cognitive psychology literature. In spite of this, there are relatively few studies that have attempted to apply ACT-R to situations involving social interaction. This is an important omission since the social aspects of cognition have been a growing area of interest in the cognitive science community, and an understanding of the dynamics of collective cognition is of particular importance in many organizational settings. In order to support the computational modeling and simulation of socially-distributed cognitive processes, a simulation capability based on the ACT-R architecture is described. This capability features a number of extensions to the core ACT-R architecture that are intended to support social interaction and collaborative problem solving. The core features of a number of supporting applications and services are also described. These applications/services support the execution, monitoring and analysis of simulation experiments. Finally, a system designed to record human behavioral data in a collective problem-solving task is described. This system is being used to undertake a range of experiments with teams of human subjects, and it will ultimately support the development of high fidelity ACT-R cognitive models. Such models can be used in conjunction with the ACT-R simulation capability to test hypotheses concerning the interaction between cognitive, social and technological factors in tasks involving socially-distributed information processing