Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) is a widely used engineering technique for designing, identifying and eliminating known and/or potential failures, problems, errors and so on from system, design, process, and/or service before they reach the customer (Stamatis, 1995). In a typical FMEA, for each failure modes, three risk factors; severity (S), occurrence (O), and detectability (D) are e...

The paper aims to introduce an approach that integrates a technique of knowledge engineering (Ontologies) and a technique of quality engineering (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis). An approach will be set up that shows the potentials of combining IT-based systems of knowledge and quality engineering. Particularly with regard to the quality engineering technique, the paper aims to demonstrate t...

Traditional methods for the assessment of software safety suffer from poor integration (from methodological, operational and semantic points of view) both with each other and with the rest of the development lifecycle of safety-critical systems. Our goal is to develop a set of methods and tools which address these weaknesses, and this paper describes our current research into these areas. We de...

A convenient approach to small-x evolution in QCD is the dipole picture which was formulated by Mueller a decade ago [1–3]. Mueller’s formalism leads to the BFKL equation but it also goes beyond the BFKL formalism, since here it is possible to take into account unitarisation effects due to multiple scatterings (multiple pomeron exchanges). In Mueller’s model dipoles in the same cascade (wavefun...

Emerging safety analysis techniques use composition of failure models or fault simulation in formal models of a system to determine relationships between the causes and effects of failure. Most recent work has focused on developing system modelling and algorithms for automatic safety analysis. However, little work has focused on developing principles to improve reuse of safety analyses in the c...

The work presented here uses a library of behavior models of system components as a core for supportive tools for several work processes during the life cycle. Models of complex systems can be automatically composed from such library elements and provide the basis for the automated generation, instead of programming, of diagnostics and fault analysis. The feasibility of this model-based methodo...

The goal of quality and reliability systems is the same-to achieve customer satisfaction. Quality and reliability are synonymous. A system cannot be reliable if it does not have high quality. Likewise, a system cannot be of high quality if it is not reliable. The quality performance of a firm is often assessed by the reliability of the firm's equipment or machinery. If a system is unreliable, i...

The overall dependability of an interactive system is the one of its weakest component which is usually its user interface. The presented approach integrates techniques from the dependable computing field and elements of user-centred design to provide a wider coverage of possible faults. Risk analysis and fault tolerance techniques are used in combination with task analysis and modelling to des...