The system availability process indicates whether or not the interconnection of components is operating as intended at each time instant. It is shown that a 2-states system availability process that results from a transformation of a Markov chain is not a Markov chain. The probabilistic characterization of the system availability process is given.

Since the end of the cold war the United States is the single dominant naval power in the world. The emphasis of the last decade has been to reduce cost while maintaining this status. As the Navy's infrastructure decreases, so too does its ability to be an active participant in all aspects of ship operations and design. One way that the navy has achieved large savings is by using the Military Sealift Command to manage day to day operations of the Navy's auxiliary and underway replenishment ships. While these ships are an active part of the Navy's fighting force, they infrequently are put into harm's way. The natural progression in the design of these ships is to have them fully classified under current American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) rules, as they closely resemble commercial ships. The first new design to be fully classed under ABS is the T-AKE. The Navy and ABS consider the T-AKE program a trial to determine if a partnership between the two organizations can extend into the classification of all new naval ships. A major difficulty in this venture is how to translate the knowledge base which led to the development of current military specifications into rules that ABS can use for future ships. The specific task required by the Navy in this project is to predict the inherent availability of the new T-AKE class ship. To accomplish this task, the reliability of T-AKE equipment and machinery must be known. Under normal conditions reliability data would be obtained from past ships with similar mission, equipment and machinery. Due to the unique nature of the T-AKE acquisition, this is not possible. Because of the use of commercial off the shelf (COTS) equipment and machinery, military equipment and machinery reliability data can not be used directly to predict T-AKE availability. This problem is compounded by the fact that existing COTS equipment and machinery reliability data developed in commercial applications may not be applicable to a military application. A method for deriving reliability data for commercial equipment and machinery adapted or used in military applications is required. A Reliability Transform Method is developed that allows the interpolation of reliability data between commercial equipment and machinery operating in a commercial environment, commercial equipment and machinery operating in a military environment, and military equipment and machinery operating in a military environment. The reliability data for T-AKE is created using this Reliability Transform Method and the commercial reliability data. The reliability data is then used to calculate the inherent availability of T-AKE. / Master of Science

No description available.

No description available.

The interaction between the main ions in aquaponics nutrient solutions affects chemical composition and availability of nutrients, and nutrient uptake by plant roots. This study determined the effect of pH on phosphorus (P) speciation and availability in an aquaponics nutrient solution and used Visual MINTEQ to simulate P species and P activity. In both experimental and simulated results, P availability decreased with increase in pH of aquaponics nutrient solutions. According to simulations, P binds to several cations leaving less free phosphate ions available in solution. High pH values resulted in the formation of insoluble calcium phosphate species. The study also demonstrated the importance of organic matter and alkalinity in keeping free phosphate ions in solution at high pH ranges. It is recommended though that pH in aquaponics systems is maintained at a 5.5-7.2 range for optimal availability and uptake by plants. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

This study presents reliability and availability analysis of mining systems with hardware and human-error failures. The failures of proposed models representing the mining systems could be safe or unsafe. To understand model reliability and availability behaviours, different values of failure and repair rates were used at different number of parallel units and different repair policies. Also, a model with partial and complete failures was analysed beside two miscellaneous models representing systems used in mining sector. The failure and repair rates are assumed constant. Markov method was used to perform analysis of the models and Laplace transforms were used to solve associated equations.

ABSTRACT Introduction: Sexually transmitted infections (STI) are a major public health concern because they are frequent, with high prevalence and incidence; they can result in serious complications and sequaelae; they have social and economic consequences; and a number of STIs have been identified as facilitating the spread of HIV. STI’s are a major public health concern in South Africa, accounting for about 11 million cases annually. It is estimated that approximately 5.3 million South Africans were infected with HIV at the end of 2002 and controlling STI by a steady supply of resources, among other interventions, could contribute to lowering of the incidence of HIV. Methods: The study was a cross-sectional descriptive survey of fixed primary health care clinics offering STI services in three sub-districts of the Johannesburg Metro. A convenient sample of 22 fixed clinics was surveyed. The 11 Johannesburg Metro sub-districts were stratified according to suburban, township and inner-city. Descriptive statistics were used to analyse the data. These were proportions(percentages) to summarise categorical data; and means were used to summarise numerical variables Results: All facilities had adequate equipment except for two clinics (10% of facilities), one in region 10 and the other in region 8. More than 70% of PHC facilities had clinical management guidelines in every consultation room. Over 60% of clinics reported having no IEC materials written in local language. All facilities had condoms strategically located in accessible places and only two reported condom stock-outs. Two clinics reported drugs stock-outs prior to assessment and only one reported drug stock-outs during the assessment. All the clinics offered services between 7am and 4pm daily and more than 80% of clinics offered counselling and HIV testing. Partner notification was a problem in facilities in all the regions.

I addressed how light availability influences sexual and clonal offspring production, demographic performance and contribution to population dynamics by studying the Neotropical understory herb Calathea marantifolia across a light gradient in Costa Rica. To understand how demographic performance was influenced by light availability I conducted a transplant experiment in the field. Both seedlings and clonal offspring grew best when planted in high light areas, but seedlings showed a faster and more dramatic response. Survival of seedlings was greatest in high light sites but clonal offspring survival was greatest where light availability was low. To examine the demographic consequences of physiological integration between parent plants and their clonal offspring I combined an isotope tracing study with a severing experiment in natural populations. Very little water was transported between parent and offspring. Severing the connections between parent and offspring did not influence the demographic performance of parent plants, but clonal offspring were negatively affected, especially prior to rooting. I investigated the demographic cost of sexual reproduction by manipulating the sexual reproductive effort of plants in the field. Increasing the sexual reproductive effort of plants did not reduce their future demographic performance. However, subsequently produced clonal offspring displayed a small reduction in size due to their parent's increased reproduction. To understand the contribution of both reproductive modes for population growth rate I used field data collected in plots with high and low light. Data from the first census interval were used to develop a new size-structured integral projection model that includes both sexual and clonal recruitment. Population growth rate was faster in high light than in low light and a life table response experiment revealed that this difference was primarily due to improved survival and growth at large sizes and increased clonal reproduction in high light. By removing reproductive modes from the model, I found that sexual reproduction contributes more to population growth than clonal reproduction. When only sexual reproduction is included in the model population growth rate is fastest in high light environments. By contrast, when only clonal reproduction is included in the model population growth rate is fastest low light.

The main objective for this degree project is to implement an Application Availability Monitoring (AAM) system named Softek EnView for Fujitsu Services. The aim of implementing the AAM system is to proactively identify end user performance problems, such as application and site performance, before the actual end users experience them. No matter how well applications and sites are designed and nomatter how well they meet business requirements, they are useless to the end users if the performance is slow and/or unreliable. It is important for the customers to find out whether the end user problems are caused by the network or application malfunction. The Softek EnView was comprised of the following EnView components: Robot, Monitor, Reporter, Collector and Repository. The implemented system, however, is designed to use only some of these EnView elements: Robot, Reporter and depository. Robots can be placed at any key user location and are dedicated to customers, which means that when the number of customers increases, at the sametime the amount of Robots will increase. To make the AAM system ideal for the company to use, it was integrated with Fujitsu Services’ centralised monitoring system, BMC PATROL Enterprise Manager (PEM). That was actually the reason for deciding to drop the EnView Monitor element. After the system was fully implemented, the AAM system was ready for production. Transactions were (and are) written and deployed on Robots to simulate typical end user actions. These transactions are configured to run with certain intervals, which are defined collectively with customers. While they are driven against customers’ applicationsautomatically, transactions collect availability data and response time data all the time. In case of a failure in transactions, the robot immediately quits the transactionand writes detailed information to a log file about what went wrong and which element failed while going through an application. Then an alert is generated by a BMC PATROL Agent based on this data and is sent to the BMC PEM. Fujitsu Services’ monitoring room receives the alert, reacts to it according to the incident management process in ITIL and by alerting system specialists on critical incidents to resolve problems. As a result of the data gathered by the Robots, weekly reports, which contain detailed statistics and trend analyses of ongoing quality of IT services, is provided for the Customers.

Thesis (M.S.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1993. / Vita. Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 25-26). Also available via the Internet.