How to increase efficiency with the certification of process compliance

Certification as well as self-assessment of safety-critical systems is an expensive and time-consuming activity due to the necessity of providing numerous deliverables. These deliverables can be process-related or product-related. Process-related deliverables are aimed at showing compliance with normative documents (e.g., safety standards), which impose specific requirements on the development process (e.g., reference models for the safety life-cycles). In this lecture, we limit our attention to process-related deliverables and we propose a solution aimed at reducing time and cost related to their provision. Our solution consists of the combination of three approaches: the safety-oriented process line engineering approach, the process-based argumentation line approach, and the model driven certification-oriented approach. More specifically, we define how these three approaches are combined and which techniques, tools and guidelines should be used to implement the resulting approach. Then, via small-sized but realistic process-fragments, we illustrate it. Finally, we present a roadmap for future research directions.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

The promotion of data sharing in pharmacoepidemiology

This article addresses the role of pharmacoepidemiology in patient safety and the crucial role of data sharing in ensuring that such activities occur. Against the backdrop of proposed reforms of European data protection legislation, it considers whether the current legislative landscape adequately facilitates this essential data sharing. It is argued that rather than maximising and promoting the benefits of such activities by facilitating data sharing, current and proposed legislative landscapes hamper these vital activities. The article posits that current and proposed data protection approaches to pharmacoepidemiology — and more broadly, re-uses of data — should be reoriented towards enabling these important safety enhancing activities. Two potential solutions are offered: 1) a dedicated working party on data reuse for health research and 2) the introduction of new, dedicated legislation

Design Criteria to Architect Continuous Experimentation for Self-Driving Vehicles

The software powering today's vehicles surpasses mechatronics as the dominating engineering challenge due to its fast evolving and innovative nature. In addition, the software and system architecture for upcoming vehicles with automated driving functionality is already processing ~750MB/s - corresponding to over 180 simultaneous 4K-video streams from popular video-on-demand services. Hence, self-driving cars will run so much software to resemble "small data centers on wheels" rather than just transportation vehicles. Continuous Integration, Deployment, and Experimentation have been successfully adopted for software-only products as enabling methodology for feedback-based software development. For example, a popular search engine conducts ~250 experiments each day to improve the software based on its users' behavior. This work investigates design criteria for the software architecture and the corresponding software development and deployment process for complex cyber-physical systems, with the goal of enabling Continuous Experimentation as a way to achieve continuous software evolution. Our research involved reviewing related literature on the topic to extract relevant design requirements. The study is concluded by describing the software development and deployment process and software architecture adopted by our self-driving vehicle laboratory, both based on the extracted criteria.Comment: Copyright 2017 IEEE. Paper submitted and accepted at the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture. 8 pages, 2 figures. Published in IEEE Xplore Digital Library, URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7930218

The stewardship of things: Property and responsibility in the management of manufactured goods

In the context of broad-based concerns about the need to move towards a more sustainable materials economy, particularly as they are expressed in debates around ecological modernisation (EM), we argue that product stewardship has radical potential as a means to promote significant change in the relationship between society and the material world. We focus on two important dimensions that have been neglected in approaches to product stewardship to date. Firstly, we argue that immanent within the basic concept of stewardship is a problematisation of dominant understandings of property ownership in neoliberal market economies. In the space opened up by notions of stewardship, different ways of enacting both rights and responsibilities to products and materials emerge which have potential to advance the sustainability of material economies. Secondly, through exploration of existing expressions of product stewardship, we uncover a neglected scale of action. Both policy and dominant articulations of EM focus primarily on the efficiency of production processes; and secondarily, the attitudes and behaviours of individual consumers. Missing from this is the 'meso-scale' of social collectives including households, neighbourhoods, more distributed communities and small scale social enterprises. Based on a review of existing research from Australia and the UK, including our own, we argue that understanding of embedded practices of material responsibility at the household scale can both reinvigorate the concept of product stewardship as a potentially radical intervention, and reveal the potential of the meso-scale as a challenging but worthwhile realm of policy intervention

Remanufacturing and product design: designing for the 7th generation

The following is taken directly from the research report. This report investigates Design for Remanufacture in terms of both detailed product design and the business context in which Design for Remanufacture may operate. Key Study Objectives • To understand the link between design and remanufacture • To understand how Design for Remanufacture can lead to increased innovation and Sustainable Development (SD) • To identify proactive strategies to further Design for Remanufactur

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

Early aspects: aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design

This paper reports on the third Early Aspects: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design Workshop, which has been held in Lancaster, UK, on March 21, 2004. The workshop included a presentation session and working sessions in which the particular topics on early aspects were discussed. The primary goal of the workshop was to focus on challenges to defining methodical software development processes for aspects from early on in the software life cycle and explore the potential of proposed methods and techniques to scale up to industrial applications