The spatial aspects of fairness

As well as their family background, an individual's chances in life are determined by the opportunities available to them in their geographical context. This chapter therefore deals with the spatial aspects of fairness. It focuses, firstly, on socio-economic factors which are not randomly distributed in space (i.e. they have a geographical pattern). Secondly, it focuses, not on first nature geographical differences which cannot be changed (such as the presence of mountains), but on second nature geographical factors (such as access to basic services or hospitals) which can be altered and which are important in overcoming a region's natural disadvantages. It then links the two

Trust requirements in E-Business : a conceptual framework

Trust in information services and technologies is an increasingly important issue. The development of trust between businesses, consumers and other stakeholders is seen as crucial to the expansion of e-business markets, and the full exploitation of technological developments in this area [3, 5, 11]. However, the way in which trust may be gained in this context is not yet well understood. Requirements relating to trust are seen from many different perspectives by different stakeholders, and often expressed in different terms. There is therefore a need for a common framework or language, which will support a shared understanding of the concept of trust, and which will allow the requirements of different stakeholders to be discussed in common terms

Access Control Requirements for Processing Electronic Health Records

There is currently a strong focus worldwide on the potential of large-scale Electronic Health Record systems to cut costs and improve patient outcomes through increased e±ciency. A number of countries are developing nationwide EHR systems to aggregate services currently provided by isolated Electronic Medical Record databases. However, such aggregation introduces new risks for patient privacy and data security, both by linking previously-separate pieces of information about an individual, and by creating single access points to a wide range of personal data. It is thus essential that new access control policies and mechanisms are devised for federated Electronic Health Record systems, to ensure not only that sensitive patient data is accessible by authorized personnel only, but also that it is available when needed in life-critical situations. Here we review the traditional security models for access control, Discretionary Access Control, Mandatory Access Control and Role-Based Access Control, and use a case study to demonstrate that no single one of them is su±cient in a federated healthcare environment. We then show how the required level of data security can be achieved through a judicious combination of all three mechanisms

FORMENTOR: Real-time operator advisory system for loss control. Application to a petro-chemical plant

This paper describes FORMENTOR, a real-time expert system that offers on-line decision support to operators of a complex plant who are faced with unusual and potentially hazardous situations. After the overall project background has been described, the essential requirements of such a system are outlined. The paper will then focus on one of the developed pilot applications, a supervisory and decision support system for operators of an extractive distillation unit of a petro-chemical plant. The most important techniques and models used will be discussed. A number of generic and well defined tasks have been identified for a plant supervisory system like FORMENTOR to allow it to monitor on-line sensor data and detect precursor signs of abnormal plant behaviour, to diagnose the causes of the malfunction and finally to yield operational advice for managing the abnormal situation. This set of tasks include data retrieval, monitoring, diagnosing, assessing the current situation, assessing the consequences of the current situation, countermeasure planning and finally generation of advice. These generic tasks are instantiated in this particular application. In addition, main technical features of this pilot application are a functional model used to provide a global overview of the plant state and to guide the action planning process, a multi-layered structural model used to represent the functional components of the plant in a hierarchical way, and the use of two distinct but complementary reasoning modules for diagnosis, both based on this multi-level model. Of the two diagnostic reasoning modules one, the Heuristic Causal Reasoning module, identifies known problems, looks up the known solutions, and then adapts the implementation of these high-level solutions to the plant state. The other, the Model-Based Reasoning module, uses a more sophisticated model-based reasoning to find the root causes of a disturbance. The developed FORMENTOR system has been installed on an extractive distillation plant operated by BP-Chemicals Ltd. Its performance in responding to real plant upsets has been evaluated. The main results of this testing campaign are also reported.JRC.(ISEI)-Institute For Systems Engineering And Informatic