A continuous tension exists between the day to day requirements for a new product and the requirements in exceptional cases. The System Architect must understand both requirements and be able to discuss them in terms of value in order to make a balanced product. This article gives some handles to tackle this problem. This article builds upon the paper "Requirements Capturing by the System Archi...

In the paper a binary quantiier x(';) is studied. It can be read as`typically, ''s are 's'. After investigating some formal properties of this quantiier, we compare the resulting logic with predicate conditional logic and discuss possible applications of binary quantiiers in formalizing defeasible reasoning.

Kawasaki disease (KD) was first described in Japan in 1967 by Tomisaku Kawasaki [1]. It is an acute, systemic, self-limited vasculitis, whose targets are medium diameter vessels in each organ and apparatus. It is a vasculitis of unknown aetiology, probably multifactorial, that occurs predominantly in infants and young children. The most important complications are coronary arteries aneurysms or...

BACKGROUND A typical peak timing in the glucagon stimulation test has been reported as an indication of growth hormone (GH) deficiency. Other stimulation tests have not been evaluated. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the clinical usefulness of peak timing in the arginine stimulation test (AST) for growth hormone deficiency. METHODS Retrospective review of 199 ASTs from one center. Outcomes included c...

We address a problem of setting reorder points (expressed as time supplies) of a population of items, subject to a restricted set of possible time supplies as well as a budget on the total amount of safety stocks, both important practical constraints. We provide a branch-and-bound algorithm for obtaining the optimal solution. In addition, a simple and e$cient heuristic algorithm has been develo...

We consider an information theoretic model of a communication channel with a time-varying probability law. Specifically, our model consists of a state dependent discrete memoryless channel, in which the underlying state process is independent and identically distributed with known probability distribution, and for which the channel output at any time instant depends on the inputs and states onl...

An irreversible cycle model of a Braysson heat engine operating between two heat reservoirs is used to investigate the thermoeconomic performance of the cycle affected by the finite-rate heat transfer between the working fluid and the heat reservoirs, heat leak loss from the heat source to the ambient and the irreversibility within the cycle. The thermoeconomic objective function, defined as th...