Developing system models to help Great Britain's railways embrace innovative technologies with confidence

Railways are under pressure to become more efficient and cut their costs; innovation has a part to play in achieving these goals. The railway is, however, a complex and closely coupled system, making it difficult in the early stages of development, to be clear what the system-wide impact of innovation will be. The research covered in this paper stems from the idea that computer-based models of existing systems can help overcome this problem, by providing a baseline framework against which the impact of innovation can be identified. The paper describes development of a repeatable modelling methodology, which elicits\ud objective system data from Railway Group Standards and integrates it using CORE®, a powerful system modelling tool, to create system models. The ability of such models to help identify impacts is verified, using as an example the introduction of RailBAM (a new technology that acoustically monitors the health of rolling stock axle bearings) into the existing hot axle bearing detection system

Recently published papers: pulmonary care, pandemics, and eugenics in surviving sepsis?

Respiratory failure is one of the leading admission diagnoses on the critical care unit, and the journals have reflected this over the past few months. An understanding of the aetiology of pulmonary sepsis is important but your choice of ventilator gas humidification system is not. There are prophecies of more pandemics, but panic is futile because survival is all down to your genes

Recently published papers: pneumonia, hypothermia and the elderly

Pneumonia (hospital-acquired and community-acquired) is commonly encountered in intensive care. Several papers recently published on this subject have shed more light on different aspects of this important topic. Hypothermia has been shown to improve post-arrest outcome, but how often do we use it? And finally, several papers have recently appeared in the journals related to the admission of the elderly to the critical care area and their outcome