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Software Quality and Fitness for Purpose
Following on to my recent post on certification requirements for commercial aircraft, John Rushby and I have been discussed a paper of his, on commercial aircraft software and the guidelines DO178B, in the invited session on certification at EMSOFT 2011. John is concerned with whether DO178B “works”, that is, leads to high-quality code which is…
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Certification Requirements for Commercial Airplanes
I was browsing the invited lectures given under Martin Abadi’s College de France lecture series and came across this elegant, simple explanation of so-called Byzantine failures by the gentleman who invented the term, Leslie Lamport. Leslie’s two papers on the subject with Rob Shostak and Marshall Pease in the early 1980’s, Reaching Agreement in the…
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Chinese Train Collision
On Saturday July 23, a high-speed train lost power and either slowed down or stalled, and a second one rear-ended it, in or near Wenzhou city, on a line in Hanhzhou province: the Independent newspaper reports. The lost power was said to be due to a lightning strike. Unfortunately, the collision took place on a…
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A Fukushima Diary
In preparation for my talk at the 11th Bieleschweig Workshop, on the Fukushima accident and systems prone to extreme usafe events, I have prepared a synopsis of my contributions to the mailing list on the accident which we set up in Bielefeld, called A Fukushima Diary. It’s about 110pp long, so a little too long…
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Standardising Causal Analysis
As a member of the German national committee for standards concerning the functional safety of electrical/electronic/programmable-electronic systems (known in the jargon as E/E/PE systems), I received on 11th May a document sent to another standards committee, proposing an international standardisation project for Root Cause Failure Analysis through the International Electrotechnical Commission, IEC, the ISO affiliate…
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Probabilistic and Possibilistic Analysis, the Precautionary Principle and EUEs
Yesterday, Werner U brought our attention, on a closed mailing list of which I have been a member for almost two decades, to a study by John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State University, and Mark Stewart, a civil engineer at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales of the costs and potential…
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11th Bieleschweig Workshop: The Fukushima Accident and Systems Prone to EUE
Readers might like to know about the 11th Bieleschweig Workshop on System Engineering, which will take place in Bielefeld in the Senate Room of the University on 3rd-4th August, 2011. The topic will be Interacting with Extreme Risk: The Fukushima Accident. We organise the Bieleschweig Workshops. I think that there exist the foundations of a…
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The Epidemiology of Memes and its Effect upon Safety
Richard Dawkins has the notion of memes. They are, crudely speaking, thoughts or ideas or ways of thinking or cultural traits, that spread through society. The idea occurs in his well-known book The Selfish Gene, published 45 years ago this year. I am interested in – and often frustrated by – the ways that ideas,…
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Fukushima Dai-ichi Accident: Sociologist Needed!
I have been working this year with sociologists, in a research group composed largely of visitors to Bielefeld’s residential research institute ZiF. The group is working on Communicating Disaster. Then one happened – an enormous natural event triggered a disaster. Let me look at part of it, namely the system-safety disaster at the Fukushima Dai-ichi…
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Fukushima, the Tsunami Hazard, and Engineering Practice
The conclusion first, as well as at the end. For safety-critical infrastructure, there should be required a continuously-maintained, public safety case. Members of the public may at any time look it up. A wise government will make provision for commentary and rework where necessary. I am well aware that this sets the importance of a…