System Design

Es gibt bis heute keine allgemein anerkannte, konsistente Designtheorie; es besteht nicht einmal ansatzweise Konsens zur Frage, was Designtheorie sein könnte. Andererseits gibt es zahlreiche "Designtheorien", teils parallel existierend, teils einander in schneller Folge ablösend. Auch diese Arbeit erhebt nicht den Anspruch, die von einigen langersehnte, von vielen für unmöglich erklärte und von den meisten Praktikern als eher überflüssig empfundene Theorie zu liefern. Sie präsentiert Überlegungen zur Entwicklung einer Begrifflichkeit, die geeignet sein könnte, den strukturellen und prozessualen Rahmen einer erst noch zu erarbeitenden Theorie des Entwerfens zu bilden. Dieser Rahmen sollte das Abstraktions- und Reflexionsniveau einer Wissenschaftstheorie besitzen. Er schafft damit die Distanz und die erforderlichen begrifflichen Hilfsmittel zur produktiven Kritik, Reflexion und Neuordnung der vorhandenen Theorie- und Methodikelemente. Konsequenzen auf der Ebene des praktisch-disziplinären Handelns werden angedacht und sind in weiteren Schritten zu präzisieren. Zur Konstruktion dieses Theorierahmens scheinen Elemente der Systemtheorie, insbesondere der Theorie selbstorganisierender Systeme, der operativen Erkenntnistheorie (second order cybernetics) und der handlungsorientierten Kognitionswissenschaften geeignet zu sein.

This paper presents a process of systematization and analysis of the reliability parameters of a proportional hydraulic platform that aims to study position control using hydraulic systems. Currently the positioning systems using hydraulic circuits include mechanical and electronic components and software. These automatic systems involve diverse and complex technologies, for which reason the reliability analysis is difficult. Moreover, the failure modes which can occur in each item can produce distinct effects, increasing the complexity of this analysis. The control of all parameters involved becomes very difficult for the design agents, with consequences for the other phases of the life cycle. In this regard a methodology to systemize the information necessary to obtain a product with reliability is proposed. In this process, hierarchic FTA and FMEA diagrams are used as tools for the systematization of the reliability parameters, and Petri Nets are is used to represent the states a...

In recent years, online auction systems such as eBay have been more and more popular. The client-server architecture is usually adopted for the basic architecture of online auction systems. However, the client/server architecture usually causes the problems of bandwidth bottleneck and insufficient storage spaces. Therefore, we propose to replace the client/server architecture of traditional online auction systems to P2P architecture

To illustrate and test the applicability and performance of the innovative honey-bee mating optimization (HBMO) algorithm in highly non-convex hydropower system design and operation, two problems are considered: single reservoir and multi-reservoir. Both hydropower problems are formulated to minimize the total present net cost of the system, while achieving the maximum possible ratio for generated power to installed capacity. The single hydropower reservoir problem is approached by the developed algorithm in 10 different runs. The first feasible solution was generated initially and later improved significantly and solutions converged to a near optimal solution very rapidly. In the application of the proposed algorithm to a five-reservoir hydropower system with 48 periods and a total of 230 decision variables, in early mating flights, the first feasible solution was identified and the results converged to a near optimal solution in later mating flights. In the case of the multi-reservoir problem, an efficient gradient-based nonlinear-programming solver (LINGO 8.0) failed to find a feasible solution and for the single hydropower reservoir design problem it performed much worse than the proposed algorithm.

The Sphinx-4 speech recognition system is the latest addition to Carnegie Mellon University's repository of Sphinx speech recognition systems. It has been jointly designed by Carnegie Mellon University, Sun Microsystems Laboratories and Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories. It is differently designed from the earlier Sphinx systems in terms of modularity, flexibility and algorithmic aspects. It uses newer search strategies, is universal in its acceptance of various kinds of grammars and language models, types of acoustic ...

There is an essential need to provide a solution to reduce the elder care expenses according to growth in ratio of elderly population in the world and the high cost of health care services that are offered for each elderly person. Tele-homecare is one of the most appropriate solutions for this issue. The importance and necessity to provide a new

We present a foundational theory of software system re-liability based on components. The theory describes how component developers can design and test their components to produce measurements that are later used by system de-signers to calculate composite system reliability — ...

As of November 1999, you may electronically access NUREG-series publications and other NRC records at NRC's Public Electronic Reading Room at http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm.html. Publicly released records include, to name a few, NUREG-series publications; Federal Register ...

In the array of water Cherenkov detectors of the Pierre Auger Observatory, 4800 large photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) will be used. Before being deployed, each PMT is evaluated to check that various parameters, such as the linearity, dark noise, and gain, fall within a specified range. The large scale test system, designed and con- structed for this purpose, is capable of

System development for Image-Guided Therapy (IGT), or Image-Guided Interventions (IGI), continues to be an area of active interest across academic and industry groups. This is an emerging field that is growing rapidly: major academic institutions and medical device manufacturers have produced IGT technologies that are in routine clinical use, dozens of high-impact publications are published in well regarded journals each year, and several small companies have successfully commercialized sophisticated IGT systems. In meetings between IGT investigators over the last two years, a consensus has emerged that several key areas must be addressed collaboratively by the community to reach the next level of impact and efficiency in IGT research and development to improve patient care. These meetings culminated in a two-day workshop that brought together several academic and industrial

People spend a large portion of time at their workplace and henceforth, need actions to recharge their mind and body. Therefore, it is important to highlight on health promotion activities in the workplace that focus on changing personal health behaviours such as diet. Research has revealed that physical activities increase work efficiency [1] and planned naps taken during work keep suitable levels of waking function for daytime and night-time work [2]. Most relevant research has been done without considering the theoretical concept and empirical approach. This study aims to develop persuasive applications incorporating psychological theories to combine these implicit measures such as consuming a healthy diet, physical activity and napping at the workplace. The quantitative and qualitative approach will be used to empirically measuring the effectiveness of the applications in the context of employees' health behaviour change. It is hoped that users will benefit from improved health using the applications.

An investigation to localise facial landmarks from 3D images is presented, without using any assumption concerning facial pose. This paper introduces new surface descriptors, which are derived from either unstructured face data, or a radial basis function (RBF) model of the facial surface. Two new variants of feature descriptors are described, generally named as point - triplet descriptors because they require three vertices to be computed. The first is related to the classical depth map feature, which is referred to as weighted - interpolated depth map. The second variant of descriptors are derived from an implicit RBF model, they are referred to as surface RBF signature (SRS) features. Both variants of descriptors are able to encode surface information within a triangular region defined by a point - triplet into a surface signature, which could be useful not only for 3D face processing but also within a number of graph based retrieval applications. These descriptors are embedded into a system designed to localise the nose - tip and two inner - eye corners. Landmark localisation performance is reported by computing errors of estimated landmark locations against our respective ground --truth data from the Face Recognition Grand Challenge (FRGC) database.

Cognitive Radios have been advanced as a technology for the opportunistic use of under-utilized spectrum since they are able to sense the spectrum and use frequency bands if no Primary user is detected. However, the required sensitivity is very demanding since any individual radio might face a deep fade. We propose light-weight cooperation in sensing based on hard decisions to mitigate the sensitivity requirements on individual radios. We show that the "link budget" that system designers have to reserve for fading is a significant function of the required probability of detection. Even a few cooperating users (~10-20) facing independent fades are enough to achieve practical threshold levels by drastically reducing individual detection requirements. Hard decisions perform almost as well as soft decisions in achieving these gains. Cooperative gains in a environment where shadowing is correlated, is limited by the cooperation footprint (area in which users cooperate). In essence, a few independent users are more robust than many correlated users. Unfortunately, cooperative gain is very sensitive to adversarial/failing Cognitive Radios. Radios that fail in a known way (always report the presence/absence of a Primary user) can be compensated for by censoring them. On the other hand, radios that fail in unmodeled ways or may be malicious, introduce a bound on achievable sensitivity reductions. As a rule of thumb, if we believe that 1/N users can fail in an unknown way, then the cooperation gains are limited to what is possible with N trusted users.