369,304 research outputs found
THE TOWER OF BABEL? THE INNOVATION SYSTEM APPROACH VERSUS MAINSTREAM ECONOMICS.
The Innovation systems (IS) approach and the system failures it identifies, play an important role in the design and legitimization of innovation policy. This paper analyses the usefulness of this concept. We conclude that the IS-approach can be useful to visualize the complexity of the innovation processes. However, for policy design this approach is less suited, because system failures aim at symptoms in stead of underlying incentive structures. In our view, policy design should be based on standard economic framework of market- and government failures. Theoretically, an exception is the system failure path dependency. However, the empirical evidence for the existence of this phenomenon is mixed. Furthermore, policy initiatives to tackle path dependence are likely to be subject to severe government failure.innovation policy, Innovation systems, market failure
NMESys: An expert system for network fault detection
The problem of network management is becoming an increasingly difficult and challenging task. It is very common today to find heterogeneous networks consisting of many different types of computers, operating systems, and protocols. The complexity of implementing a network with this many components is difficult enough, while the maintenance of such a network is an even larger problem. A prototype network management expert system, NMESys, implemented in the C Language Integrated Production System (CLIPS). NMESys concentrates on solving some of the critical problems encountered in managing a large network. The major goal of NMESys is to provide a network operator with an expert system tool to quickly and accurately detect hard failures, potential failures, and to minimize or eliminate user down time in a large network
Development and Validation of Functional Model of a Cruise Control System
Modern automobiles can be considered as a collection of many subsystems
working with each other to realize safe transportation of the occupants.
Innovative technologies that make transportation easier are increasingly
incorporated into the automobile in the form of functionalities. These new
functionalities in turn increase the complexity of the system framework present
and traceability is lost or becomes very tricky in the process. This hugely
impacts the development phase of an automobile, in which, the safety and
reliability of the automobile design should be ensured. Hence, there is a need
to ensure operational safety of the vehicles while adding new functionalities
to the vehicle. To address this issue, functional models of such systems are
created and analysed. The main purpose of developing a functional model is to
improve the traceability and reusability of a system which reduces development
time and cost. Operational safety of the system is ensured by analysing the
system with respect to random and systematic failures and including safety
mechanism to prevent such failures. This paper discusses the development and
validation of a functional model of a conventional cruise control system in a
passenger vehicle based on the ISO 26262 Road Vehicles - Functional Safety
standard. A methodology for creating functional architectures and an
architecture of a cruise control system developed using the methodology are
presented.Comment: In Proceedings FESCA 2016, arXiv:1603.0837
A Pattern Language for High-Performance Computing Resilience
High-performance computing systems (HPC) provide powerful capabilities for
modeling, simulation, and data analytics for a broad class of computational
problems. They enable extreme performance of the order of quadrillion
floating-point arithmetic calculations per second by aggregating the power of
millions of compute, memory, networking and storage components. With the
rapidly growing scale and complexity of HPC systems for achieving even greater
performance, ensuring their reliable operation in the face of system
degradations and failures is a critical challenge. System fault events often
lead the scientific applications to produce incorrect results, or may even
cause their untimely termination. The sheer number of components in modern
extreme-scale HPC systems and the complex interactions and dependencies among
the hardware and software components, the applications, and the physical
environment makes the design of practical solutions that support fault
resilience a complex undertaking. To manage this complexity, we developed a
methodology for designing HPC resilience solutions using design patterns. We
codified the well-known techniques for handling faults, errors and failures
that have been devised, applied and improved upon over the past three decades
in the form of design patterns. In this paper, we present a pattern language to
enable a structured approach to the development of HPC resilience solutions.
The pattern language reveals the relations among the resilience patterns and
provides the means to explore alternative techniques for handling a specific
fault model that may have different efficiency and complexity characteristics.
Using the pattern language enables the design and implementation of
comprehensive resilience solutions as a set of interconnected resilience
patterns that can be instantiated across layers of the system stack.Comment: Proceedings of the 22nd European Conference on Pattern Languages of
Program
Engineering failure analysis and design optimisation with HiP-HOPS
The scale and complexity of computer-based safety critical systems, like those used in the transport and manufacturing industries, pose significant challenges for failure analysis. Over the last decade, research has focused on automating this task. In one approach, predictive models of system failure are constructed from the topology of the system and local component failure models using a process of composition. An alternative approach employs model-checking of state automata to study the effects of failure and verify system safety properties. In this paper, we discuss these two approaches to failure analysis. We then focus on Hierarchically Performed Hazard Origin & Propagation Studies (HiP-HOPS) - one of the more advanced compositional approaches - and discuss its capabilities for automatic synthesis of fault trees, combinatorial Failure Modes and Effects Analyses, and reliability versus cost optimisation of systems via application of automatic model transformations. We summarise these contributions and demonstrate the application of HiP-HOPS on a simplified fuel oil system for a ship engine. In light of this example, we discuss strengths and limitations of the method in relation to other state-of-the-art techniques. In particular, because HiP-HOPS is deductive in nature, relating system failures back to their causes, it is less prone to combinatorial explosion and can more readily be iterated. For this reason, it enables exhaustive assessment of combinations of failures and design optimisation using computationally expensive meta-heuristics. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved
Design for Improving Hospital Stroke Unit Processes: Reducing Complex Systems Failures Leading to Adverse Patient Outcomes
This paper describes recent research involving a user-focused design analysis of in-hospital residential treatment for stroke patients.
The focus of the research was to identify positive and negative design heuristics associated with addressing poor performance, errors and failures of patient care associated with current designs of hospital systems processes being inadequate to address actual levels of system complexity.
The research findings are based on an in–depth case study following a single patient through a stroke unit in a medium scale hospital of (approximately 280 acute beds overall) with 26 stroke unit beds. The case study involved over 200 hours of observations over nine weeks and liaison with hospital and family over the four months of the patient’s stay in hospital.
The findings suggest an explanation for the lack of effective advantage so far shown for integrated care as compared to conventional multidisciplinary care. In essence, they suggest that integrated stroke care and multidisciplinary care are both subject to similar serious systemic organisational failures that in effect reduce outcomes of both to a similar compromised position.
The paper concludes with three design heuristics for improving stroke unit outcomes via improving the design of stroke unit organisational systems. These proposed heuristics may be of benefit more widely in hospital system design for improved outcomes.
Keywords:
Hospital System Design, Design Strategies, User-Based Assessment, Case Study, Viable System Model</p
Controlling Financial Chaos: The Power and Limits of Law
This Essay examines how law can help to control financial chaos. To that end, regulation should strive to not only maximize economic efficiency within the financial system but also protect the financial system itself. Any regulatory framework for achieving these goals, however, will be imperfect and have tradeoffs. Increasing financial complexity has created information failures that even disclosure cannot remedy, whereas law-imposed standardization would have its own flaws. Bounded human rationality limits the effectiveness of even otherwise ideal laws. Furthermore, the increasing dispersion of financial risk is undermining monitoring incentives. We also do not yet fully understand how systemic risk is triggered and spread. Because regulation therefore cannot prevent systemic shocks, regulation should also operate to reduce systemic consequences by stabilizing parts of the financial system afflicted by those shocks
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