Analysing occupational safety culture through mass media monitoring

In the last years, a group of researchers within the National Institute for Insurance against Accidents at Work (INAIL) has launched a pilot project about mass media monitoring in order to find out how the press deal with the culture of safety and health at work. To monitor mass media, the Institute has created a relational database of news concerning occupational injuries and diseases, that was filled with information obtained from the newspaper articles about work-related accidents and incidents, including the text itself of the articles. In keeping with that, the ultimate objective is to identify the major lines for awareness-raising actions on safety and health at work. In a first phase of this project, 1,858 news articles regarding 580 different accidents were collected; for each injury, not only the news texts but also several variables were identified. Our hypothesis is that, for different kind of accidents, a different language is used by journalists to narrate the events. To verify it, a text clustering procedure is implemented on the articles, together with a Lexical Correspondence Analysis; our purpose is to find language distinctions connected to groups of similar injuries. The identification of various ways in reporting the events, in fact, could provide new elements to describe safety knowledge, also establishing collaborations with journalists in order to enhance the communication and raise people attention toward workers' safety

simulation for change management an industrial application

Abstract This paper describes an application of change management in the context of a growing company: the ABC enterprise. The first step of the proposed methodological framework involves the construction of the As-is process model, adopting the standard BPMN language. The model is based on an accurate analysis of the data concerning the resources and activities of the company being analyzed, in order to perform a computational simulation of its business processes. After examining existing solutions for business challenges and technological opportunities, several scenarios can be proposed that include possible changes to existing processes. By simulating these scenarios, the results can suggest to analysts useful information to evaluate possible restructuring actions in a quantitative way, comparing the values of an appropriate set of indicators before and after the model's restructuring

Response to "Imaging to diagnose acute appendicitis".

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The M*-object methodology for information system design in CIM environments : the organisation analysis phase

M*-OBJECT is a methodology for information system analysis, design and implementation developed for CIM environments. It is based on an object-oriented approach and it covers in-depth analysis of static and dynamic aspects of the CIM information system. M*-OBJECT is made of three major phases : organisation analysis, conceptual design and implementation design. The organisation analysis phase provides a structured set of requirements. The conceptual design phase provides executable formal specifications of the information system. The implementation design phase provides the implementation description of necessary databases. Each phase is supported by a dedicated model and set of guidelines which can be computerised. This article focuses on the organisation analysis phase for which an organisation model based on the concepts of agent, event, function (process and activity) and component is proposed

A Simulation-driven Approach in Risk-aware Business Process Management: A Case Study in Healthcare

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Discrete-time dynamic modeling for software and services composition as an extension of the Markov chain approach

Abstract-Discrete Time Markov Chains (DTMCs) and Continuous Time Markov Chains (CTMCs) are often used to model various types of phenomena, such as, for example, the behavior of software products. In that case, Markov chains are widely used to describe possible time-varying behavior of "self-adaptive" software systems, where the transition from one state to another represents alternative choices at the software code level, taken according to a certain probability distribution. From a control-theoretical standpoint, some of these probabilities can be interpreted as control signals and others can just be observed. However, the translation between a DTMC or CTMC model and a corresponding first principle model, that can be used to design a control system is not immediate. This paper investigates a possible solution for translating a CTMC model into a dynamic system, with focus on the control of computing systems components. Notice that DTMC models can be translated as well, providing additional information

Autotuning control structures for reliability-driven dynamic binding

Abstract-This paper explores a formally grounded approach to solve the problem of dynamic binding in serviceoriented software architecture. Dynamic binding is a widely adopted mean to automatically bind exposed software interfaces to actual implementations. The execution of an operation on one or another implementation, though providing the same result, could turn out in different quality of service, e.g. due to failure occurrence. Dynamic binding is thus of primary importance to achieve what in the Software Engineering domain is called "selfadaptiveness", the capability to preserve a desired quality of service, if this is feasible. It is important to reach this goal also in the presence of environmental fluctuations -a route congestion increase -or even abrupt variations -a server breakdown. A quite general dynamic binding problem is here reformulated as a discrete-time feedback control one, and the use of autotuning techniques is discussed, extending previous research, in a view to guaranteeing the desired quality of service without the need for computationally-intensive optimisations

The M*-object methodology for information system design in CIM environments : the conceptual design phase

M*-OBJECT is a methodology for the analysis, design and implementation of CIM information systems. In this paper, the conceptual design phase is presented. It starts from users information requirements and provides a conceptual specification, the conceptual schema, of the information system to be used in the integrated manufacturing system to be designed. This methodological phase is supported by the Process and Data Net (PDN) model which integrates an objet-oriented data model, a query and data manipulation language, a process model, and an object behaviour description model. The major features of the specification approach are : static, dynamic, and behavioural properties of information are fully covered, complex data structures and data manipulation can be specified, and specifications are executable for rapid prototyping