Specifying Reusable Components

Reusable software components need expressive specifications. This paper outlines a rigorous foundation to model-based contracts, a method to equip classes with strong contracts that support accurate design, implementation, and formal verification of reusable components. Model-based contracts conservatively extend the classic Design by Contract with a notion of model, which underpins the precise definitions of such concepts as abstract equivalence and specification completeness. Experiments applying model-based contracts to libraries of data structures suggest that the method enables accurate specification of practical software

Ensuring quality in apprenticeships: a survey of subcontracted provision

This report evaluates the quality of apprenticeships with a particular focus on subcontracting arrangements. The findings draw on evidence from visits to 17 providers, an online survey of 500 apprentices, and an analysis of national data and inspection reports published since September 2011. - Age group: post-1

Current practice and challenges towards handling uncertainty for effective outcomes in maintenance

The combination of viable heuristic attributes with statistical measurements presents significant challenges in industrial maintenance for complex assets under through-life service contracts. Techniques to obtain and process heuristic attributes raise numerous uncertainties which often go undefined and unmitigated. A holistic view of these uncertainties may improve decision-making capabilities and reduce maintenance costs and turnaround time. It is therefore necessary to identify and rank factors that influence uncertainties originating from challenges in the above context. This, along with an identification of who contributes to such challenges and current practice to handle them, sets the focus for this study. The influence of 32 categorised factors on uncertainty is assessed through a questionnaire completed by nine experienced maintenance managers from a leading defence company. The pedigree approach is applied to score validity of respondents’ answers according to their experience and job role to normalise scores. Results are discussed in interviews with respondents along with current practice in and ways to improve uncertainty assessment. Scores are weighted through the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) in order to identify the most influential factors on uncertainty in maintenance. The analysis revealed that these include: intellectual property rights (IPR), maintainer performance, quality of information, resistance to change, stakeholder communication and technology integration. These are verified with 40 practitioners from various industrial backgrounds. From the interviews, it is deemed that a holistic view of heuristic and statistical attributes ultimately allows for more accomplished decision-making but requires trade-offs between quality and cost over the asset’s life cycle

MANAGEMENT AND RESCUE FROM CRISIS

Management is the primary factor for overall amplification of efficiency, effectiveness and competitiveness of the companies and economy. In this context, is significant to highlight promotion of strategic management, managerial reengineering, improving organizational and managerial culture, privatization of state management companies, professionalization of managers and management. All this, conceived on the generating causes of strengths and weaknesses, resulted on managerial and economic diagnosis of economic operators, can be integrated into a model of efficient management, whose operationalization will result in obtaining managerial performance and thus economic.management, crisis management, managerial skills, management reengineering

Constructive Matrix Theory

We extend the technique of constructive expansions to compute the connected functions of matrix models in a uniform way as the size of the matrix increases. This provides the main missing ingredient for a non-perturbative construction of the $\phi^{\star 4}_4$ field theory on the Moyal four dimensional space.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure