New air trafhc management concepts distribute the responsibility for traffic separation among the several actors of the aerospace system. As a consequence, these concepts move the safety risk from human controllers to the onboard software and hardware systems. One example of the new kind of distributed systems is air traffic conflict detection and resolution. Traditional methods for safety anal...

In this paper, we assess the state of the art of Quality of Services (QoS) support in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Unlike traditional end-to-end multimedia applications, many non-end-to-end mission-critical applications envisioned for WSNs have brought forward new QoS requirements on the network. Further, unique characteristics of WSNs, such as extremely resource-constrained sensors, large-...

A common and important feature of many safety critical interactive devices is number entry. In hospitals, number entry takes the form of setting drug parameters such as doses, volumes, etc. There are several ways a number entry interface can be designed with different consequences for error and speed. Nurses and healthcare practitioners usually have to interact with different interfaces often u...

Peer-to-peer systems have reached a widespread use, ranging from academic and industrial applications to home entertainment. The key advantage of this paradigm lies in its scalability and flexibility, consequences of the participants sharing their resources for the common welfare. Security in such systems is a desirable goal. For example, when mission-critical operations or bank transactions ar...

Westerly wind bursts (WWBs) in the equatorial Pacific occur during the development of most El Niño events and are believed to be a major factor in ENSO’s dynamics. Because of their short time scale, WWBs are normally considered part of a stochastic forcing of ENSO, completely external to the interannual ENSO variability. Recent observational studies, however, suggest that the occurrence and cha...

Critical and conflict materials (CCMs) are providing an important material infrastructure for recent technological shifts. Relying on text analysis of US Patent Trademark Office (USPTO) data, this exploratory study examines the geographical linkages between paradigms selected CCMs. Our descriptive finds evidence a clear association information communication technologies (ICTs) CCM intensity ove...

Increasingly complex requirements, coupled with with tighter economic and organizational constraints, are making it hard to build complex distributed real-time embedded (DRE) systems entirely from scratch. The proportion of DRE systems made up of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and software is therefore increasing significantly. There are relatively few systematic empirical studies, ho...

Trusted sourcing for mission critical integrated circuits is required per DoD policy 5200.44 yet economic forces have caused the semiconductor industry to predominantly shift overseas. This “globalization” of the semiconductor industry has reduced availability of US suppliers thereby limiting potential Trusted sources. Concurrent with this shift, consumer market pressures are now driving semico...

Due to its dynamic and rapid development and due to a variety of academic disciplines and research communities contributing to information systems (IS) research, a broad variety of research approaches can be found. These approaches are often discussed as contrasting “paradigms”. Positivism and interpretivism are frequently accepted to be the most relevant paradigms (cf., for instance, Klein & M...