This paper reports on an investigation of the possible influence of modelling errors on the relationship between the entropy and hydraulic reliability of water distribution systems. The errors are due to minor differences between the design optimisation and subsequent simulation models, which lead to small discrepancies between the capacity of the network and the required supply. Pressure-depen...

The reliability of clinical methods is often taken for granted. There is considerable evidence, however, that variability of clinical measurements, interpretations, and judgements are greater than commonly thought. Inconsistency of clinical methods has profound and widespread implications in clinical practice. The inferential capacity of measurements depends on accuracy and reproducibility. App...

The capacity benefit of network coding has been extensively studied in wired and wireless networks. Moreover, it has been shown that network coding improves network reliability by reducing the number of packet retransmissions in lossy networks. However, the extent of the reliability benefit of network coding is not known. In this work, we characterize the reliability benefit of network coding f...

When planning the structure of a backhaul mesh network for public access, it is common to introduce redundant nodes in the mesh network. These are called redundant, because they do not increase the network capacity under normal operation, due to the shortest-path metric of the routing protocol. Instead, their sole purpose is to increase the network reliability by providing failover links when a...

Body sensor networks have gained continuous popularity in applications such as monitoring, sports training, and interactive gaming. However, data communication reliability is critical for the success of various applications such as ECG/EKG data analysis. In this paper, we propose a loss resilient strategy where prioritized scheduling and packet concatenation schemes are integrated for high netw...

Abstract—In this study, a general approach to the reliability based limit analysis of laterally loaded piles is presented. In engineering practice the uncertainties play a very important role. The aim of this study is to evaluate the lateral load capacity of free-head and fixed-head long pile when plastic limit analysis is considered. In addition to the plastic limit analysis to control the pla...

To improve safety performance, many healthcare organizations have sought to emulate high reliability organizations from industries such as nuclear power, chemical processing, and military operations. We outline high reliability design principles for healthcare organizations including both the formal structures and the informal practices that complement those structures. A stage model of organiz...

This paper describes how MEADEP [SoHaR00], a system level dependability prediction tool, and SMERFS [Farr93], a software reliability growth prediction tool can be used together to predict system reliability, and availability growth) for complex systems. The Littlewood/Verrall model is used to predict reliability growth from software test data. This prediction is integrated into a system level M...

Modern disk drives have become highly complex with increasing demands on high throughput, high reliability, high capacity, and low cost most of which are typically mutually exclusive. This paper takes a look at the reliability aspect of disk drives, and, more specifically, factors that cause a drive to fail. Failures fall into three main categories: hardware, software, and process. Many of the ...

In this paper we address the reliability problem in storage-centric sensor networks deployed in hazardous environments. We use the nodes’ extra flash memory to save distributed encoded blocks of data. We employ erasure coding to substantially improve the trade-off between storage reliability and required disk capacity. Moreover, efficient mechanisms are designed for spreading the encoded pieces...