<p>The use of computer-based systems is rapidly increasing and such systems can now be found in a wide range of applications, including safety-critical applications such as cars and aircrafts. To make the development of such systems more efficient, there is a need for tools for automatic safety analysis, such as analysis of fault tolerance.</p><p>In this thesis, a tool for automatic formal analysis of fault tolerance was developed. The tool is built on top of the existing development environment for the synchronous language Esterel, and provides an output that can be visualised in the Item toolkit for fault tree analysis (FTA). The development of the tool demonstrates how fault tolerance analysis based on formal verification can be automated. The generated output from the fault tolerance analysis can be represented as a fault tree that is familiar to engineers from the traditional FTA analysis. The work also demonstrates that interesting attributes of the relationship between a critical fault combination and the input signals can be generated automatically.</p><p>Two case studies were used to test and demonstrate the functionality of the developed tool. A fault tolerance analysis was performed on a hydraulic leakage detection system, which is a real industrial system, but also on a synthetic system, which was modeled for this purpose.</p>

In the presence of operational uncertainty, one of the greatest challenges in systems engineering is to ensure system effectiveness, mission capability and survivability. Safety management is shifting from passive, reactive and diagnosis-based approaches to autonomous architectures that will manage safety and survivability through active, proactive and prognosis-based solutions. Resilience engineering is an emerging discipline, with alternative recommendations on safer and more survivable system architectures. A resilient system can "absorb" the impact of change due to unexpected disturbances, while it "adapts" to change, in order to maintain its physical integrity and mission capability. A framework of proposed resilience estimations is the basis for a scenario-based assessment technique, driven by modeling and simulation-based (M&S) analysis, for obtaining system performance, health monitoring, damage propagation and overall mission capability responses. For the technique development and testing, a small-scale canonical problem has been formulated, involving a reconfigurable spring-mass-damper system, in a multi-spring configuration. Operational uncertainty is introduced through disturbance factors, such as external forces with varying magnitude, input frequency, event duration and occurrence time. Case studies with varying levels of damping and alternative reconfiguration strategies return the effects of operational uncertainty on system performance, mission capability, and survivability, as well as on the "restore", "absorb", and "adapt" resilience capacities. The Topological Investigation for Resilient and Effective Systems, through Increased Architecture Survivability (TIRESIAS) technique is demonstrated for a reduced scale, reconfigurable naval cooling network application. With uncertainty effects modeled through network leak combinations, TIRESIAS provides insight on leak effects to survival times, mission capability degradations, and on resilience function capacities, for the baseline configuration. Comparative case studies were conducted for different architecture configurations, which have been generated for different total number of control valves and valve locations on the topology.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--West Virginia University, 2001. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains xxxviii, 330 p. : ill. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 327-330).

The thesis introduces a new quantitative safety modelling approach for large scale socio-technical systems that exhibit Low Probability High Consequence (LPHC) accidents. This approach uses Bayesian Belief Networks (BBN) and overcomes inherent difficulties of current methods, difficulties that make these methods incapable of coping with complexities of socio-technical systems.

The use of computer-based systems is rapidly increasing and such systems can now be found in a wide range of applications, including safety-critical applications such as cars and aircrafts. To make the development of such systems more efficient, there is a need for tools for automatic safety analysis, such as analysis of fault tolerance. In this thesis, a tool for automatic formal analysis of fault tolerance was developed. The tool is built on top of the existing development environment for the synchronous language Esterel, and provides an output that can be visualised in the Item toolkit for fault tree analysis (FTA). The development of the tool demonstrates how fault tolerance analysis based on formal verification can be automated. The generated output from the fault tolerance analysis can be represented as a fault tree that is familiar to engineers from the traditional FTA analysis. The work also demonstrates that interesting attributes of the relationship between a critical fault combination and the input signals can be generated automatically. Two case studies were used to test and demonstrate the functionality of the developed tool. A fault tolerance analysis was performed on a hydraulic leakage detection system, which is a real industrial system, but also on a synthetic system, which was modeled for this purpose.

There are still many challenges in the field of VANETs that encouraged researchers to conduct further investigation in this field to meet these challenges. The issue pertaining to routing protocols such as delivering the warning messages to the vehicles facing Non-Line of Sight (NLOS) situations without causing the storm problem and channel contention, is regarded as a serious dilemma which is required to be tackled in VANET, especially in congested environments. This requires the designing of an efficient mechanism of routing protocol that can broadcast the warning messages from the emergency vehicles to the vehicles under NLOS, reducing the overhead and increasing the packet delivery ratio with a reduced time delay and channel utilisation. The main aim of this work is to develop the novel routing protocol for a high-density environment in VANET through utilisation of its high mobility features, aid of the sensors such as Global Positioning System (GPS) and Navigation System (NS). In this work, the cooperative approach has been used to develop the routing protocol called the Co-operative Volunteer Protocol (CVP), which uses volunteer vehicles to disseminate the warning message from the source to the target vehicle under NLOS issue; this also increases the packet delivery ratio, detection of NLOS and resolution of NLOS by delivering the warning message successfully to the vehicle under NLOS, thereby causing a direct impact on the reduction of collisions between vehicles in normal mode and emergency mode on the road near intersections or on highways. The cooperative approach adopted for warning message dissemination reduced the rebroadcast rate of messages, thereby decreasing significantly the storm issue and the channel contention. A novel architecture has been developed by utilising the concept of a Context-Aware System (CAS), which clarifies the OBU components and their interaction with each other in order to collect data and take the decisions based on the sensed circumstances. The proposed architecture has been divided into three main phases: sensing, processing and acting. The results obtained from the validation of the proposed CVP protocol using the simulator EstiNet under specific conditions and parameters showed that performance of the proposed protocol is better than that of the GRANT protocol with regard to several metrics such as packet delivery ratio, neighbourhood awareness, channel utilisation, overhead and latency. It is also successfully shown that the proposed CVP could detect the NLOS situation and solves it effectively and efficiently for both the intersection scenario in urban areas and the highway scenario.

The diploma thesis deals with security risk assessment at the VUT object on Purkyňova Street. The aim is to detect security vulnerabilities and to propose measures that could reduce security risks.

<p>Extra-terrestrial habitats will be embedded in challenging environments and involve complex and tightly coupled combinations of hardware, software, and humans. Such systems will be exposed to many risks, both known and unknown, and anticipating all failures and environmental impacts will not be possible. In addition, complexity and tight coupling in these systems means space habitats are likely to experience system accidents, which arise not only from the failure of individual components but also from the interactions among components. Therefore, we propose a control-theoretic approach to resilient space habitat design, which is grounded in system safety engineering and goes beyond event and component-centric failure models underlying conventional risk-based design. We model the system from a state-based perspective where the habitat is in one of four distinct types of states at a given time: nominal, hazardous, safe, or accident. The habitat transitions from a nominal state to a hazardous state via disruptions, and further to safe and accident states via triggers. We use safety controls to prevent the system from entering or remaining in a hazardous or accident state, or to transition the system into a temporary safe state or back to a nominal state. We develop a safety control option space, from which designers choose the best control strategy to meet resilience, performance, cost, and other system goals. We show the development of a control effectiveness metric, which is defined to assess how well safety controls address the hazardous state or disruption for which they are designed. The control effectiveness metric is one dimension of the overall hazard mitigation evaluation, which should also include aspects like cost and launch mass. We validate this approach by assessing individual safety controls in the Modular-Coupled Virtual Testbed (MCVT). This physics-based habitat simulation models complex disruption scenarios which include unique combinations of hazardous states and safety controls. The MCVT allows for the activation of individual (and sets of) safety controls of varying control effectiveness values to evaluate habitat resilience under different control architectures. Using this simulation, we evaluate the control effectiveness metric to determine whether the definition is appropriate to select safety controls that lead to desired habitat resilience. Completing the validation of this metric is the first step towards the validation of the overall control-theoretic approach to resilient space habitat design. </p>

No description available.

To analyze the system development, manufacturing practices and system evaluation procedures of representative PPES manufacturers, two companies (i.e., one "small", referred to here as "simple manufacturer (SM)", and one "large", referred here as "complex manufacturer (CM)" — in terms of workforce, market presence, and capital) that develop first responder PPES, which voluntarily agreed to participate in the research were chosen. The complex PPES is an Air-Pak, a self contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) used by first responders for artificial breathing in life-threatening scenarios and the simple PPES is the Fire-Eye device, a thermal sensor that attaches to the visor of the firefighter in order to convey the visual warning of the ambient thermal environment. In order to differentiate the two distinct methodological approaches, the dissertation has been split into two different parts. The first methodology is a "case study" type of empirical investigation which follows a triangulation approach utilizing surveys, structured interviews, process and system observations, and examination of archival records. The second type of methodology is an experimental empirical research one, which involves laboratory-scale and full-scale real-life fire scenarios to conduct product evaluation. The research goals of the case study research were to identify the problems faced by the manufacturers of PPES and to formulate guidelines with regards to manufacturing, compliance, design and development processes, etc., for the PPES manufacturers. The investigation sought answer to the following key questions: a) How do PPES manufacturers currently approach the systems design and development process and what best practices in manufacturing and quality control have they adopted? b) What human factors and ergonomic measures are adopted by these companies while designing their products and what human testing is conducted by companies? c)What safety measures are considered by the safety designer while designing the product? The recommendations also include modifications to the product design process taking into account the market trends in the product design processes, involvement of ergonomics and safety aspects. The research goals for the experimental part of this dissertation were to identify appropriate evaluation methods and conduct the PPES evaluation in simulated fire environments. The Fire-Eye device primarily functions in hot environments and warns the firefighters of the ambient temperature. Therefore, the laboratory-scale evaluation was conducted using test methods such as the Static Oven, Fire Equipment Evaluator, and Radiant Panel, methods which represent controlled environment test conditions. The Fire-Eye device was also evaluated in realistic fire environment created in an ISO burn room by conducting several tests using different types of fuels such as Heptane, Natural Gas, and Living-room set-up (i.e., furniture as fuel). The Fire-Eye device was tested for repeatability and reproducibility of its performance in both of the experimental settings. Statistical data analysis was conducted to determine any differences in performance of the Fire-Eye device among each laboratory-scale methods as well as to compare the performance of the device between laboratory-scale and full-scale fire environments in identical heat locations. The results suggest that a dual approach (laboratory-scale and full-scale fire environment) for evaluating the performance of PPES is more effective than is testing the device in either one of the methods. / Ph. D.