dependability study

Winning Ways: The Funeral Profession's Guide to Human Relations
$51.95
I found this volume to be concise, informational, sound advice on funeral etiquette and professional guidance. It's well written, contains useful tidbits of information using references to famous statesmen and other celebrities, giving credence to the author's viewpoints. I gained a lot of insight from this writing and expect it will give others the same useful advice, who are seeking a career change, or career advancement in this honorable profession. A must read!

Design of intelligent distributed control systems: a dependability point of view [An article from: Reliability Engineering and System Safety]
$5.95
This digital document is a journal article from Reliability Engineering and System Safety, published by Elsevier in 2004. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
The use of fieldbuses and the emergence of intelligent sensors and actuators are opening up new possibilities for distributed control systems, but are also introducing additional constraints in terms of achieving dependability objectives. The type of production environment will greatly determine the predominant criterion for an automatic control system, i.e. reliability, availability, maintainability, safety, etc. On the other hand, the choice of a fieldbus system will also depend on factors such as application size, data throughput, and integration of time considerations. Other important criteria include cost, confidentiality, and compatibility with existing equipment. Therefore, it appears essential that designers be given the means to assess dependability at each design step by integrating feedback from experience. Assessing dependability is too often limited to an evaluation at the end of the design process, which often involves reselecting previous choices. The main topic of this paper is to focus on the communication function which is a pivotal of intelligent distributed control systems. So this article is a synthesis of different aspects linked to the design of fieldbus based applications thanks to the contributors, who come from various fields. Consequently it highlights the main problem and give some ways to solve them.

Architecting Dependable Systems (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)
$64.95
As software systems become more and more ubiquitous, the issues of dependability become more and more critical. Given that solutions to these issues must be planned at the beginning of the design process, it is appropriate that these issues be addressed at the architectural level. This book is inspired by the ICSE 2002 Workshop on Architecting Dependable Systems; it is devoted to current topics relevant for improving the state of the art for architecting dependability. Some of the 13 peer-reviewed papers presented were initially presented at the workshop, others were invited in order to achieve competent and complete coverage of all relevant aspects. The papers are organized in topical sections on- architectures for dependability- fault tolerance in software architectures- dependability analysis in software architectures- industrial experience.

Dependability Modelling under Uncertainty: An Imprecise Probabilistic Approach (Studies in Computational Intelligence)
$139.00
Mechatronic design processes have become shorter and more parallelized, induced by growing time-to-market pressure. Methods that enable quantitative analysis in early design stages are required, should dependability analyses aim to influence the design. Due to the limited amount of data in this phase, the level of uncertainty is high and explicit modeling of these uncertainties becomes necessary. This work introduces new uncertainty-preserving dependability methods for early design stages. These include the propagation of uncertainty through dependability models, the activation of data from similar components for analyses and the integration of uncertain dependability predictions into an optimization framework. It is shown that Dempster-Shafer theory can be an alternative to probability theory in early design stage dependability predictions. Expert estimates can be represented, input uncertainty is propagated through the system and prediction uncertainty can be measured and interpreted. The resulting coherent methodology can be applied to represent the uncertainty in dependability models.