objective neuromuscular disorders (diseases of the motor unit), can cause respiratory problems such as impaired cough reflex, chest deformity, recurrent pneumonia and acute respiratory failure; these are the worst most common complications of these diseases and the leading cause of death in such patients (1, 2). their management hence, very often, entails admission to the pediatric intensive ca...

This document describes a number of approaches for the dependability characterization of middleware implementations, and in particular failure mode analysis of CORBA ORB implementations. The aim of the work is to provide an overall approach for identifying and quantifying failure modes using various fault injection techniques and fault models. Related work in dependability characterization of e...

In the United States, when medical devices are associated with adverse events that result in death or serious injury, or have malfunctions that could lead to death/serious injury, these events must be reported to the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Devices and Radiologic Health by device manufacturers and user facilities. However, the defects in the medical device evaluation process (...

It is well recognised that long-term planning and management of renewable energy resources is subject to severe uncertainty. For a large part, this uncertainty is due to the complex relationships between social, economic, and environmental systems, including availability, usage patterns, demographic evolution, global warming, just to mention a few. Traditionally, this uncertainty is encoded via...

The occurrence of a probabilistic common-cause failure (PCCF) in a system results in failures of multiple system components with different probabilities. A PCCF can be caused by external shocks or propagated failures originating from some components within the system. This paper proposes an explicit method and an implicit method to analyze the reliability of systems subject to internal or exter...