INTRODUCTION The accidents at Texas City and Buncefield remind us of the importance of human factors in preventing major accident hazards in the Process Industry. Much of the advice focuses on organisational factors required to ensure a motivated and competent workforce working within a good safety culture. Another key area that is often overlooked is the design of plants, processes and procedu...

In this paper, we consider the problem of modeling machine availability in enterprise-area and wide-area distributed computing settings. Using availability data gathered from three different environments, we detail the suitability of four potential statistical distributions for each data set: exponential, Pareto, Weibull, and hyperexponential. In each case, we use software we have developed to ...

This paper presents our analysis of the failure behavior of large scale systems using the failure logs collected by Los Alamos National Laboratory on 22 of their computing clusters.We note that not all nodes show similar failure behavior in the systems. Our objective, therefore, was to arrive at an ordering of nodes to be incrementally (one by one) selected for duplication so as to achieve a ta...

This paper turns the concept of input distributions on its head to exploit inverse input distributions Al though such distributions are not always true math ematical inverses they do capture an intuitive prop erty inputs that have high frequencies in the original distribution will have low frequencies in the inverse distribution and vice versa We can use the inverse distribution in several di e...

One of the most common and costly problems that organizations are facing is to find the causes of failures in business processes. Failures are often due to missing or unnecessary execution of some process activities; or with how some activities are performed. Currently, there is no automatic technique that helps finding these causes. We propose a novel technique to identify potential causes of ...

When designing products, it is crucial to assure failure and risk-free operation in the intended operating environment. Failures are typically studied and eliminated as much as possible during the early stages of design. The few failures that go undetected result in unacceptable damage and losses in high-risk applications where public safety is of concern. Published NASA and NTSB accident repor...

When designing products, it is crucial to assure failure and risk-free operation in the intended operating environment. Failures are typically studied and eliminated as much as possible during the early stages of design. The few failures that go undetected result in unacceptable damage and losses in high-risk applications where public safety is of concern. Published NASA and NTSB accident repor...

Many papers have been published on analysis and prediction of software faults and/or failures, but few addressed the software fixes made to correct the faults and prevent failures from reoccurring. This paper contributes toward filling this gap by focusing on empirical characterization of software fixes. The results are based on the data extracted from a safety-critical NASA mission. In particu...