Traditional reliability measures for computer systems can be classi ed into Computer-Centric or Application-Centric categories. The former concentrate on the hardware resources while ignoring the application's needs. The latter focus on the requirements of a speci c application which is being executed, thus requiring the knowledge of all the details of the application; information which may not...

This paper deals with the real-time optimization of uncertain plants and proposes an approach based on surrogate models to reach the plant optimum when the plant cost gradient is imperfectly known. It is shown that, for processes with only box constraints, the optimum is reached upon convergence if the multiplicative gradient uncertainty lies within some bounded interval. For the case of genera...

The power system models typically used in dynamic simulations involve discrete events in addition to the standard differential-algebraic equations. Those events cause the system to jump from one continuous behavior to another. Solvers have to handle those jumps. This paper focuses on simplified time simulation where large steps are used in conjunction with stiff-decay integration methods to obt...

In this paper we consider the novel idea of Closest Feature Maps (CFMs) applied to refinable collision response in order to address the potential issues and problems associated with over approximation of contact information for time-critical collision detection schemes that utilise sphere-tree bounding volume hierarchies. Existing solutions to time-critical collision handling can at times suffe...

In modern embedded systems, e.g. avionics and automotive, it is not unusual for there to be between 40 and 100 processors with a great deal of the software having hard real-time requirements and constraints over how, when and where they execute. The requirements and constraints are essential to the overall systems dependability and safety (e.g. to ensure replicas execute on different hardware)....

OBJECTIVES To assess the performance of the hospital complaints procedure for complaints proceeding to peer review and the quality of responses to complainants. DESIGN Retrospective study of data on clinical complaints proceeding to peer review during 1986-91 from clinical records, correspondence, reports of the complaints investigations, and expert review of written responses to complainants...

We present an approach to compute the visual hulls of multiple people in real-time in the presence of occlusions. We prove that the resulting visual hulls are correct and minimal under occlusions. Our proposed algorithm runs completely on the GPU with framerates up to 50fps for multiple people using only one computer equipped with offthe-shelf hardware. We also compare runtimes for different gr...

The introduction of Native XML databases opens many research questions related to the data models used to represent and manipulate data, including temporal data, in XML. Increasing use of XML for Valid Web pages warrants an adequate treatment of now in Native XML databases. In this study, we examined how to represent and manipulate now-relative temporal data. We identify different approaches be...

Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) tags have emerged as a key technology for real-time asset tracking. Wide application of RFID leads to huge amounts of data being generated from scan of each of these RFID tags on individual items, for example, the RFID system of a moderate size retail chain will generate 300 million RFID scans per day. Extracting meaningful information out of this huge amou...

We present a novel boundary handling scheme for incompressible fluids based on Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH). In combination with the predictive-corrective incompressible SPH (PCISPH) method, the boundary handling scheme allows for larger time steps compared to existing solutions. Furthermore, an adaptive time-stepping approach is proposed. The approach automatically estimates appropria...