This paper draws upon the inspection fieldwork and reports of The Criminal Justice Inspection Northern Ireland on the problem of excessive and avoidable delays in the processing of criminal cases. Much of the delay is caused by the inherent ineffectiveness and inefficiencies of a ‘system’ that lacks a whole-systems approach to the delivery of its core services. This is demonstrated by the lack ...

Wood quality assessment is an important issue in the pulp and paper industry. In this paper an automatic visual inspection system for wood structural quality measurement is described. To improve statistical image segmentation a new logarithm based global contrast enhancement technique is described. Region identification and reconstruction is performed based on local morphological operators with...

We perform an economic analysis of the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (C-TPAT), modeling the strategic interaction between the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and trading firms as a Stackelberg game. We characterize the unique equilibrium outcome and perform comparative statics. We provide insights relevant to policy planners and to private sector trading firms. We fi...

CASE DESCRIPTION A 69-year-old male patient with nonischemic cardiomyopathy was admitted for biventricular systolic heart failure. Initial laboratory tests were cancelled due to a high lipemic index of 7 (Beckman UniCel® DxC). A redrawn sample yielded the same flag. The lipemic index did not change following ultracentrifugation in an airfuge. The sample was clear upon visual inspection but prec...

One of the tasks specified for the vision group of the RIPR project is the implementation of a run time inspection cell which is able to identify a small object, and to subsequently inspect it using a single camera, referred to as the inspection camera, attached to a robot arm. As a definite example, we may want to determine whether a hole has been machined on a particular face of the object wi...

The main concentration in the present paper is to analyze a singleunit system using the concepts of inspection, degradation, preventive maintenance, and server failure. A single repair facility inspect the original and degraded unit upon failure to check the feasibility of repair. The repair facility may fail during maintenance, repair and inspection and undergoes for treatment with Weibull pro...

Life extension of high cost components until measurable damage is detected can result in marked re ductions in total cycle costs. The life extension strategy for turbine disks is based upon nondestructive inspection to detect defects, usage and stress analysis to define requirements, and fracture mechanics analysis and testing to evaluate the severity of any defects under future usage. Because ...

This paper introduces a hierarchical optimization algorithm to an open NP-hard 3D guarding problem for massive data sets. The proposed hierarchical integer linear programming (HILP) algorithm can find the fewest spots necessary to cover an entire given 3D region. Efficiently solving this problem can greatly benefit autonomous pipeline monitoring and inspections. Unlike most existing pipeline in...

Multiple deferred state (MDS) sampling plan by attribute in which current lot and future lots information is utilised on sentencing submitted lot, is constructed under the assumption of perfect inspection. But sometimes the inspection may not be free of inspection errors. In this paper, we develop MDS-plan by attribute to the state where misclassification errors exist during the inspection. In ...