When writing can change your life, when writing can enrich you by offering much money, why don't you try it? Are you still very confused of where getting the ideas? Do you still have no idea with what you are going to write? Now, you will need reading. A good writer is a good reader at once. You can define how you write depending on what books to read. This verification techniques for system le...

In the Netherlands the current dike design policy is to design flood defence structures corresponding to an agreed flooding probability with an extra safety board of at least 0.5 m. For river dikes a return period of 1,250 years is used to determine the design water levels. A problem with this strategy is that it builds on assumptions with regard to the intrinsically uncertain probability distr...

Background and Objectives: The necessity of assessing safety in hospitals lies with the fact that although accidents are rare, they impose considerable financial loads on hospital. Along with examining the risks, the managers of hospitals need to improve their capabilities and standards and reduce the hazards caused by accidents. The present study is aimed at assessing fu...

The ground motion at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, was evaluated, and its effect on siting and conceptual design of a prospective nuclear waste repository was considered. Two levels of ground motion are proposed in this report for seismic design, the higher level for design of facilities classified as important for off-site radiological safety, the lower level for on-site safety. It is recommended th...

Safe separation between aircraft is the primary consideration in air traffic control. To achieve the required level of assurance for this safety-critical application, the Automated Airspace Concept (AAC) proposes three levels of conflict detection and resolution. Recently, a high-level operational concept was proposed to define the cooperation between components in the AAC. However, the propose...

This paper describes the validation process for the Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment, a software agent currently flying onboard NASA’s EO-1 spacecraft. The agent autonomously collects, analyzes, and reacts to onboard science data. The agent has been designed using a layered architectural approach with specific redundant safeguards to reduce the risk of agent malfunction to the EO-1 spacecraft...

High-assurance systems require a level of rigor, in both design and analysis, not typical of conventional systems. This paper provides an overview of the Multiple Independent Levels of Security and Safety (MILS) approach to high-assurance system design for security and safety critical embedded systems. MILS enables the development of a system using manageable units, each of which can be analyze...

OBJECTIVE To describe the patient safety culture of Dutch emergency departments (EDs), to examine associations between safety culture dimensions and patient safety grades as reported by ED staff and to compare these associations between nurses and physicians. DESIGN Cross-sectional survey conducted in 2007. SETTING Thirty-three non-academic EDs in the Netherlands. PARTICIPANTS Four hundre...