By describing several industrial-scale applications of formal methods, this paper intends to demonstrate that formal methods for software development and safety analysis are increasingly adopted in the safety critical systems sector. The bene ts and limitations of using formal methods are described, and the problems of developing software for safety critical systems are analysed.

BACKGROUND Consensus statements and clinical practice guidelines are widely available for enhancing the care of cancer patients. Despite subtle differences in their definition and purpose, these terms are often used interchangeably. We systematically assessed the methodological quality of consensus statements and clinical practice guidelines published in three commonly read, geographically dive...

the main purpose of this study was to investigate the factors causing the rural underdevelopment in iran. to fulfill this objective, delphi technique, as a method of refining group opinions and substituting computed consensus for an agreed-upon majority opinion, was used. the study used a series of three steps questionnaires. findings indicated that lack of a coherent strategy for sustainable r...

The authors facilitated a workshop session during the 2007 Academic Emergency Medicine Consensus Conference to address the specific research methodologies most suitable for studies investigating the effectiveness of knowledge translation interventions. Breakout session discussions, recommendations, and examples in emergency medicine findings are presented.

Intrinsic disorder in proteins plays important roles in transcriptional regulation, translation, and cellular signal transduction. The experimental annotation of the disorder lags behind the rapidly accumulating number of known protein chains, which motivates the development of computational predictors of disorder. Some of these methods address predictions of certain types/flavors of the disord...

A consensus tree method takes a collection of phylogenetic trees and outputs a single “representative” tree. The first consensus method was proposed by Adams in 1972. Since then a large variety of different methods have been developed, and there has been considerable debate over how they should be used. This paper has two goals. First, we survey the main consensus tree methods used in phylogene...

BACKGROUND Consensus-based studies are increasingly used as decision making methods, for they have lower production cost than other methods (observation, experimentation, modelling) and provide results more rapidly. The objective of this paper is to describe the principles and methods of the four main methods, Delphi, nominal group, consensus development conference and RAND/UCLA, their use as i...