The k-out-of-N structure is a popular type of redundancy in fault-tolerant systems with wide applications in computer and communication systems, and power transmission and distribution systems, among others, during the past several decades. In this paper, our interest is in such a reliability system with identical, repairable components having exponential life times, in which at least k out of ...

Introduction Preventing child abuse and neglect spares children physical and psychological pain and improves their long-term health outcomes. Dubowitz (2002) noted that prevention “is intuitively and morally preferable to intervening after the fact.” Therefore, the potential for harm to adults from child maltreatment calls us to action. Early intervention may be more effective in preventing abu...

For most parents who have used preimplantation diagnosis, the burden of playing God has been trumped by the near certainty that diseases like cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anemia will afflict the children who carry the genetic mutation that causes them. The procedure has also been used to avoid passing on Huntington’s disease, a severe neurological disease that typically does not surface unti...

Efficient utilization of today’s high-performance computing (HPC) systems with complex hardware and software components requires that the HPC applications are designed to tolerate process failures at runtime. With low mean-time-tofailure (MTTF) of current and future HPC systems, long running simulations on these systems require capabilities for gracefully handling process failures by the applic...

An instruction-retry policy is proposed to enhance the fault-tolerance of triple modular redundant (TMR) controller computers by adding time redundancy to them. A TMR failure is said to occur if a TMR system fails to establish a majority among its modules' outputs due to multiple faulty modules or a faulty voter. Either multiple consecutive TMR failures the active period of which exceeds a cert...

Maintenance outsourcing is a strategic driver for asset intensive industries pursuing to enhance supply chain performance. Spare parts management plays a relevant role in this premise since its significant impact on equipment availability, and hence on business success. Designing critical spares policies might therefore seriously affect maintenance contracts profitability, yet service receivers...