Safety case development is not a post-development activity, rather it should occur throughout the system development lifecycle. The key components in a safety case are safety arguments. Too often, safety arguments are constructed without proper reasoning. Inappropriate reasoning in safety arguments could undermine a system’s safety claims, which in turn contributes to safety-related failures of...

Workflow management systems (WfMS) based on agent technology can cope with the rapidly evolving business environment better than most other systems as they are more flexible and open. In this paper we describe a possible architecture of such a system by means of our prototype WfMS called JBees. The combination of collaborating agents and the Coloured Petri Net (CPN)-formalism in JBees enables a...

This paper presents a novel instance-based learning methodology the Binomial-Neighbour (B-N) algorithm. Unlike to other k-Nearest Neighbour algorithms, B-N employs binomial search through vectors of statistical features and distance primitives. The binomial combinations derived from the search with best classification accuracy are distinct primitives which characterise a pattern. The statistica...

Object-oriented approaches to software design and implementation have gained enormous popularity over the past two decades. However, whilst models of software systems routinely allow software engineers to express relationships between objects, object-oriented programming languages lack this ability. Instead, relationships must be encoded using complex reference structures. When the model cannot...

background: patient safety is a serious global public health issue. estimates show that every day many patients are harmed while receiving hospital care. health care staff plays a key role in providing quality and safe patient care, especially physicians who are main members of the medical team and a critical element in patient safety efforts. objective: the current study used a theory of plann...

introduction: patient safety culture is an important part of improvement in the safety of health care. knowing its present status is required for development of safety culture. the present study aimed to evaluate the current status of patient safety culture in hospitals of three central provinces of iran. method: the present cross-sectional study was performed in teaching hospitals of tehran, a...

Safety-critical systems and subsystems are often developed as a new generation of a previous system, or as a variant of a system already developed and put into operation. However, in our experience, even in such cases, where large parts of the systems are actually reused, organizations implement very much the same heavy processes as for new development. This is partly because during a safety as...

The two critical factors distinguishing inventory management in a multifirm supply-chain context from the more traditional centrally planned perspective are incentive conflicts and information asymmetries. We study the well-known order quantity/reorder point (Q r) model in a two-player context, using a framework inspired by observations during a case study. We show how traditional allocations o...