Background: Reviews of recent research-related fatalities have demonstrated that clinical research system failures likely contributed to the event. Current research safety-reporting mechanisms focus on individual protocols and are therefore less likely to detect system-level failures. Methods: We have implemented the “nearmiss” reporting system for a general clinical research center to detect l...

The need is urgent to bring US health care costs into a sustainable range for both public and private payers. Commonly, programs to contain costs use cuts, such as reductions in payment levels, benefit structures, and eligibility. A less harmful strategy would reduce waste, not value-added care. The opportunity is immense. In just 6 categories of waste--overtreatment, failures of care coordinat...

This paper compares the efficiency of different routing and resilience mechanisms to avoid congestion in a network for a set of protected failures. A routing mechanism is more efficient than another one if it achieves a lower maximum link utilization in the same networking scenario. With resilience requirements, the maximum link utilization over the set of protected failure scenarios becomes th...

Potential critical risks of cascading failures in power systems can be identified by exposing those critical electrical elements on which certain initial disturbances may cause maximum disruption to power transmission networks. In this work, we investigate cascading failures in power systems described by the direct current (DC) power flow equations, while initial disturbances take the form of a...

The IETF has developed several solutions that promote IPv4 and IPv6 co-existence, but they need to be thoroughly tested on a large scale, before they can actually be considered as viable solutions. In the following study we present an experimental evaluation of the two popular transitioning technologies: NAT64 and Dual-Stack Lite. Our first goal is to identify how well current applications, pro...

STPA (System-Theoretic Process Analysis) is a new, more powerful hazard analysis technique that assumes accidents are caused by inadequate enforcement of constraints on component behavior rather than simply component failures (ref. 3). Accidents in complex systems are often caused by unsafe interactions among components that have not failed. Because STPA includes both component failure accident...

We consider a polling system with Exhaustive service policy subject to job failures or to station failures. Each of the N stations (nodes) comprising the system is, in isolation, an M/G/1type queue. Failures at each node follow a Poisson process. A job failure causes the job to be rejected from the system, while a station failure (breakdown) causes the server to switch over to the next node. Th...

This paper presents a novel reconfigurable control method for the planar vertical take-off and landing (PVTOL) aircraft with potential actuator failures. A cascade active disturbance rejection controller (ADRC) is used to counteract the adverse effects when the actuator failure occurs. The coordinate transformation is used for model decoupling due to the severe coupling between some variables. ...