Resilient Critical Infrastructure Management using Service Oriented Architecture

Abstract—The SERSCIS project aims to support the use of interconnected systems of services in Critical Infrastructure (CI) applications. The problem of system interconnectedness is aptly demonstrated by ‘Airport Collaborative Decision Making’ (ACDM). Failure or underperformance of any of the interlinked ICT systems may compromise the ability of airports to plan their use of resources to sustain high levels of air traffic, or to provide accurate aircraft movement forecasts to the wider European air traffic management systems. The proposed solution is to introduce further SERSCIS ICT components to manage dependability and interdependency. These use semantic models of the critical infrastructure, including its ICT services, to identify faults and potential risks and to increase human awareness of them. Semantics allows information and services to be described in such a way that makes them understandable to computers. Thus when a failure (or a threat of failure) is detected, SERSCIS components can take action to manage the consequences, including changing the interdependency relationships between services. In some cases, the components will be able to take action autonomously — e.g. to manage ‘local’ issues such as the allocation of CPU time to maintain service performance, or the selection of services where there are redundant sources available. In other cases the components will alert human operators so they can take action instead. The goal of this paper is to describe a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that can be used to address the management of ICT components and interdependencies in critical infrastructure systems. Index Terms—resilience; QoS; SOA; critical infrastructure, SLA

Transgressive Partnerships: Community engagement in a South African university

Conceptualizing community engagement as intertwined with teaching and long-established approaches to research requires a consideration of the epistemology of knowledge itself. What is accepted as legitimate knowledge? And what is the scope of the university’s role in recognizing and validating forms of knowledge and defining curriculum boundaries, understood as the ways in which the university disseminates knowledge that it has validated as authentic? A working understanding of community engagement would include service learning, problem-based teaching and research that addresses specific wants and needs, the pursuit of alternative forms of knowledge and challenges to established authorities that control and direct research systems and the allocation of qualifications. This article considers why this kind of engagement has remained on the margins of the traditional university in South Africa – via a case study of community engagement at the University of Cape Town – despite a decade of clear public policy and asks: why does there appear to be resistance to its inclusion despite a number of incentives that include moral affirmation for contributing to social and economic justice

Recirculating ocean gyres

Imperial Users onl

Assessing the Olympics: Preliminary Economic Analysis of a Boston 2024 Games Impacts, Opportunities and Risks

The possibility of hosting the Summer Games is sparking significant debate in our community about the potential benefits, costs, and risks associated with hosting the Olympics. With these debates in mind, the Boston Foundation (TBF) commissioned the Economic and Public Policy Research group (EPPR) at the UMass Donahue Institute (UMDI) to perform a detailed economic impact assessment of Boston's proposed 2024 Olympic bid. While the Boston 2024 proposal is a working document and should be thought of as a "proof of concept" rather than a concrete plan, there are still several components of the proposal that can be evaluated at this time. The following report contributes to the public discourse by providing a preliminary assessment of the quantitative short-term economic impacts of hosting the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Boston. In addition, this report highlights several of the potential opportunities, challenges, and risks associated with hosting the Olympic Games that are difficult to quantifiably measure at this time, but require further attention as the Olympic bid evolves over the next couple of years

Academic freedom and the university: Fifty years of debate

Contemporary debates about academic freedom and institutional autonomy in South Africa's 'liberal' universities began in the 1950s, stimulated by the policies and legislation for racial segregation. While the form that these debates had taken has differed from university to university, the University of Cape Town stands as a good case study for the arguments and counterarguments that have been made through the years. In this essay, I trace these arguments from the middle of the last century through to the present, and show that different positions remain unreconciled, suggesting in turn a lack of consensus about the role of the university in contemporary South African society

Constructing Historical Realism : International Relations as Comparative History

In this study the author seeks to develop Historical Realism as a new approach to International Relations. Drawing on recent theoretical developments in International Relations and Historical Sociology it is argued, first, that a distinction between constitutive and causal theory is necessary and, second, that this distinction makes comparisons at a high level of abstraction across time and space possible. The explanatory focus of Historical Realism is the political reproduction of states. States are seen as constantly facing a double security dilemma: it is being threatened, or potentially threatened, by two sets of rivals for revenue. At the level of abstraction of Historical Realism, states have two possible responses, short of collapse, to this double security dilemma. They can either pursue a fortifying mode of political reproduction, whereby the essence of their strategy is to prevent rivals from gaining strength. Alternatively, they can pursue an alliance-building mode of political reproduction, whereby they cooperate with or co-opt rivals, turning them into allies instead. Which response states’ choose depend on the constitutive context they exist in, and how this is changing. The constitutive context is conceptualised with four dichotomous dimensions. International systems, it is argued, can either be functionally differentiated or not, and political relations in these systems can either be embedded in economic relations or not. The societies from which states’ extract revenue can, further, either be competitive or not, and either logistically closed or open. The second part of the study develops this conceptual framework in the contexts of Japanese political reproduction towards the end of the nineteenth century, the political reproduction, and failure, of the Roman Republic, and political reproduction in early medieval western Europe

Advanced knowledge system for coatings and the gas turbine MRO industry

The growth of data generated within thermal spraying is, for many, a daunting business. Yet, this growing resource represents a largely untapped and potentially valuable asset capable of providing 'knowledge' rather than just 'information'. Many companies already use a range of Web based tools. However, the Web itself is changing and the vision for the future, the 'Semantic Web', is set to revolutionise how business will be done. One important aspect of this Web 'future' is that web pages will be greatly enriched and data will have additional information (tags) which help to describe it and more significantly, put the data into a context. This will enable machine readability and the use of query languages to ask direct questions. Following on from ideas introduced at ITSC 2007, a proof of concept demonstrator has been built for thermal spray coatings used in the Maintenance Repair and Overhaul (MRO) of gas turbines. A system has been built which stores and manipulates a range of data including; aircraft deliveries, RSS feeds of aircraft sales, engine types, MRO business details, thermal spray coasystem and discusses its future potential