User Requirements for Mission-Critical Application – The SECRICOM Case

The SECRICOM Project as a communication system for operational crisis management, requires paying significant attention to the requirements engineering phase. Any mistakes made during the requirements gathering phase may affect the subsequent software development phases, which creates excessive operational risks for the users of the system. These types of risks – as in any other critical systems – could have serious consequences, such as inefficiency of rescue actions and loss of lives. This article presents the requirements engineering process, which was defined and carried out for the needs of the SECRICOM project. It describes the system’s environment (the crisis management reference structure and the main organizational rules) and its impact on the developed. As a result, a requirements engineering process for SECRICOM is proposed. Finally, main points of gathered requirements are presented.W systemie SECRICOM, ze względu na tworzenie systemu komunikacji do operacyjnego zarządzania kryzysowego, szczególnie ważne było położenie szczególnego nacisku na etap gromadzenia wymagań. Błędy popełnione na etapie specyfikacji wymagań mogą rzutować na kolejne etapy wytwarzania systemu, co w rezultacie generuje nadmiarowe ryzyka dla użytkowników systemu. Ryzyka te – jak w przypadku innych systemów krytycznych – mogą spowodować poważne konsekwencje, w tym obniżenie skuteczności akcji ratunkowych, a nawet straty po stronie ludności. W artykule przedstawiono proces inżynierii wymagań, który zdefiniowano oraz przeprowadzono na potrzeby projektu SECRICOM. Przedstawiono środowisko systemu (zarówno referencyjną strukturę zarządzania kryzysowego, jak i główne zasady organizacji) oraz określono wpływ na budowany system. Na zakończenie przedstawiono główne wnioski z zebranych wymagań

Seamless Communication for Crises Management

SECRICOM is proposed as a collaborative research project aiming at development of a reference security platform for EU crisis management operations with two essential ambitions: (A) Solve or mitigate problems of contemporary crisis communication infrastructures (Tetra, GSM, Citizen Band, IP) such as poor interoperability of specialized communication means, vulnerability against tapping and misuse, lack of possibilities to recover from failures, inability to use alternative data carrier and high deployment and operational costs. (B) Add new smart functions to existing services which will make the communication more effective and helpful for users. Smart functions will be provided by distributed IT systems based on an agents’ infrastructure. Achieving these two project ambitions will allow creating a pervasive and trusted communication infrastructure fulfilling requirements of crisis management users and ready for immediate application

Scheduling High Multiplicity Coupled Tasks

The coupled tasks scheduling problem is class of scheduling problems, where each task consists of two operations and a separation gap between them. The high-multiplicity is a compact encoding, where identical tasks are grouped together, and the group is specified instead of each individual task. Consequently the encoding of a problem instance is decreased significantly. In this article we derive a lower bound for the problem variant as well as propose an asymptotically optimal algorithm. The theoretical results are complemented with computational experiment, where a new algorithm is compared with three other algorithms implemented

Scheduling High Multiplicity Coupled Tasks

International audienceThe coupled tasks scheduling problem is class of scheduling problems, where each task consists of two operations and a separation gap between them. The high-multiplicity is a compact encoding, where identical tasks are grouped together, and the group is specified instead of each individual task. Consequently the encoding of a problem instance is decreased significantly. In this article we derive a lower bound for the problem variant as well as propose an asymptotically optimal algorithm. The theoretical results are complemented with computational experiment, where a new algorithm is compared with three other algorithms implemented

Information and communication technology and crisis management

In the present article selected telecommunication aspects in the area of crisis management are exposed. In particular, the focus is put on the response phase, since there are new challenges at the junction of organisational and technical layers, incl. interoperability, new functionalities and models. Those aspects have not been exhaustively tested in real situations; thus such issues still require multiple testing, verification and validation. In this article the communication problems are collated with new solutions, such as the use of cloud computing, social media and additional functionalities to increase the security level. The main aim of this article is to introduce challenges, as well as new opportunities provided by the implementation of new Information and Communication Technologies in the area of crisis management

New algorithms for coupled tasks scheduling – a survey

The coupled tasks scheduling problem is a class of scheduling problems introduced for beam steering software of sophisticated radar devices, called phased arrays. Due to increasing popularity of such radars, the importance of coupled tasks scheduling is constantly growing. Unfortunately, most of the coupled tasks problems are NP-hard, and only a few practically usable algorithms for such problems were found. This paper provides a survey of already known complexity results of various variants of coupled tasks problems. Then, it complements previous results by providing experimental results of two new polynomial algorithms for coupled tasks scheduling, which are: an exact algorithm for 1|(1,4,1),strictchains|Cmax problem, and a fast heuristic algorithm for more general 1|(1,2k, 1), strictchains|Cmax problem, where k ∈ ℕ

Scheduling high multiplicity coupled tasks

International audienc