Risk Based Maintenance in Electricity Network Organisations

Presently, maintenance management of assets in infrastructure utilities such as electricity, gas and water are widely undergoing changes towards new working environments. These are mainly driven against the background of stringent regulatory regimes, an ageing asset base, increased customer demands and constrained financial resources. Therefore,...

Modelling environmental and cognitive factors to predict performance in a stressful training scenario on a naval ship simulator

Professionals working in risky or emergency situations have to make very accurate decisions, while the quality of the decisions might be affected by the stress that these situations bring about. Integrating task feedback and biofeedback into computer-based training environments could improve trainees’ stress-coping behaviour. This paper presents...

Comparing performance and situation awareness in USAR unit tasks in a virtual and real environment

A convenient way to test Urban Search And Rescue (USAR) robots would be in virtual environments (VEs). Evaluations in VEs are generally accepted as alternative for real scenarios. There are obvious differences between operation in a real and virtual environment. Nonetheless, the current experiment showed no significant differences in situation...

Do moods affect programmers’ debug performance?

There is much research that shows people’s mood can affect their activities. This paper argues that this also applies to programmers, especially their debugging. Literature-based framework is presented linking programming with various cognitive activities as well as linking cognitive activities with moods. Further, the effect of mood on...

Performance-Oriented Fault Tolerance in Computing Systems

In this dissertation we address the overhead reduction of fault tolerance (FT) techniques. Due to technology trends such as decreasing feature sizes and lowering voltage levels, FT is becoming increasingly important in modern computing systems. FT techniques are based on some form of redundancy. It can be space redundancy (additional hardware),...

Application-Oriented Scheduling in Multicluster Grids

Grid computing appeared in the mid 1990s with the vision of sharing geographically dispersed large computational resources for executing computation-intensive scientific applications. Today, we can name numerous grid projects that run successfully to solve challenging scientific problems such as the grid project of European Organization for...

The design and implementation of the KOALA grid resource management system

Grid computing is an emerging form of distributed computing, distinguished from traditional forms by its focus on large-scale, multi-organizational resource sharing and innovative applications. To harness shared resources across multiple organizations, and at the same time to deal with the challenges of grid resource management and of deploying...

Scheduling in high performance buffered crossbar switches

High performance routers are the basic building blocks of the Internet. Most high performance routers built today use crossbars and a centralized scheduler. Due to their high scheduling complexity, crossbar-based routers are not scalable and cannot keep pace with the explosive growth of the Internet. This dissertation studies a slight variation...

Algorithms and Applications in Timed Discrete Event Systems