BACKGROUND The Strengthening Laboratory Management Toward Accreditation (SLMTA) programme is designed to build institutional capacity to help strengthen the tiered laboratory system. Most countries implement the SLMTA three-workshop series using a centralised model, whereby participants from several laboratories travel to one location to be trained together. OBJECTIVES We assessed the effecti...

Over two-thirds of the world's population lack access to surgical care. Non-governmental organisation's providing free surgeries may overcome financial barriers, but other barriers to care still exist. This analysis paper discusses two different case-finding strategies in Madagascar that aimed to increase the proportion of poor patients, women and those for whom multiple barriers to care exist....

We introduce and analyze a model for decentralized control. The model is broad enough to include problems such as formation control, decentralization of the power grid and flocking. The objective of this paper is twofold. First, we show how the issue of decentralization goes beyond having agents know only part of the state of the system. In fact, we argue that a complete theory of decentralizat...

MACSimJX provides the means for advanced modelling and development of multiagent driven control systems. This is achieved by drawing together two modelling tools used extensively in their respective communities. These are Simulink, a tool used for control systems development and JADE, an environment for developing agents. Thus the strengths of their particular domains of application may be draw...

The emergence of software-intensive systems connecting physical devices to network-based applications involves new design challenges. As an example, flexible manufacturing systems composed of multiple networked devices in interaction with the physical world, are subject to imprecision and to unpredictable breakdowns. Applications and control software are therefore highly complex, and must opera...

The traditional way of controlling urban traffic is using centralised control approaches: There is a single control centre where decisions are made about the traffic control in the whole urban area. Currently, this paradigm is shifting towards more decentralised hierarchical approaches with smaller control centres serving sub-regions of the intersection network in a city. The paper reviews poss...

The novelty of this paper is mainly the integration of multi-disciplinary software tools into a control software design environment, namely the Integrated Design Notation (IDN). The IDN supports the design, development and implementation of decentralised distributed control systems. This new environment is based on the UML meta-model standard. The translation process to integrate a control soft...

Emerging peer to peer (P2P) applications have a requirement for decentralised access control. Computational trust systems address this, achieving security through collaboration. This paper surveys current work on overlay networks, trust and identity certification. Our focus is on the particular problem of distributing evidence for use in trust-based security decisions. We present a system we ha...