In a recent change of Ministry of Defence policy, endorsed by the Second Permanent UnderSecretary and soon to be published in JSP 815 (ref. 1), the Department’s Functional Safety Boards have been asked to take on a new remit: providing End-to-End assurance of safety. But what does this mean? And how will it affect day-to-day business in the Department? This paper describes the Ship Safety Board...

There are many ways an election can go wrong or be suspect. Perhaps ballots were lost—and known to be lost. Perhaps a memory card failed—and was known to have failed. Perhaps more votes were reported than there were voters. Perhaps the announced outcome is correct but the evidence supporting it is incomplete or unconvincing. Perhaps some people claim to have observed irregularities. An election...

End-to-end communication is the problem of sending a sequence of messages from one processor , the sender, to another processor, the receiver, through an unreliable communication network. This paper surveys positive and negative results concerning deterministic protocols for end-to-end communication in asynchronous networks and presents open questions.

Thrombotic disorders, such as myocardial infarction, ischemic stroke, peripheral arterial disease, deep venous thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, or other embolic diseases that are responsible for worldwide mortality and morbidity, are manifestations of the formed thrombi by blood clots during a pathologic blood coagulation process. Once thrombi are formed, the only way to resolve the blood clot i...

Faults in computer networks may result in millions of dollars in cost. Faults in a network need to be localized and repaired to keep the health of the network. Fault management systems are used to keep today’s complex networks running without significant cost, either by using active techniques or passive techniques. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on imperialist competitive alg...

The paper first presents the factors affecting end-to-end speech quality in VoIP, such as end-to-end frame loss/concealment and end-to-end jitter. It then discusses how these factors affect the current objective speech quality measurement algorithms and suggests essential modifications for VoIP. It also highlights extensions to the basic objective measurement, such as time-varying speech measur...

This paper presents a method to design reliable applications composed of communicating entities. This method is based on the separation of communicating and processing functions to create a software “network” independent of the computational processes. Common functionalities are isolated to reduce the overhead of replication based approach. In contrast to classical techniques only the processin...