Infrastructure failure

Quality Assurance within an IT environment is as much a culmral issue as a technical one. Change management skills are vital to successfully estabhsh and maintain a quality culmre. A formal quality assurance program is hkely to be seen as an unnecessary and expensive add-on with little or no return on cost. It will not be readily understood that quality assurance programs significantly avoid or reduce costs that are due to infrastructure failures and their resolution. 

Over the same time period at least as much, and probably more, attention should be devoted to dealing with the risk that end users could be deprived of supply due to a combination of infrastructure failure and... 

Figure 7. Result of risk assessment for three types of consequences. (1) risk of infrastructure failure with catastrophic consequences i.e., bridge damage and highway failure (2) the risk to operational serviceability (through temporary road closure) (3) risk to highway maintenance.

Yes 101 Infrastructure Condition Monitoring Infrastructure failure data... 

The framework for characterising Infrastructure Failure Interdependencies, IFI, suggested by a research group at the University of British Columbia (McDaniels et al. 2007 Chang et al. 2007 Chang et al. 2009). The intention of this... 

Chang, S.E, McDaniels, T.L., Mikawoz, J. Peterson, K. 2007. Infrastructure failure interdependencies in extreme events power outage consequences in the 1998 Ice Storm. Natural Hazards 41(2) 337-358. 

Chang, S.E, McDaniels, T.L Beaubien, C. (009. Societal Impacts of Infrastructure Failure Interdependencies Building an Empirical Knowledge Base. In Proceedings of TCLEE, Oakland, June 28-July 1, 2009. 

McDaniels, T., Chang, S., Peterson, K., Mikawoz, J. Reed, D. 2007. Empirical Framework for Characterizing Infrastructure Failure Interdependencies. Journal of Infrastructure Systems 13(3) 175-184. 

Dobson, I. 2008. Analysis of cascading infrastructure failures, Wiley Hand-book of Science and Technology for Homeland Security. 

Train is outside of clearances, so that it foul of its kinematic envelope and could strike a structure or be struck by another train infrastructure failures, e.g. landslip or bridge collapse... 

Has a mechanism to highlight any infrastructure failure as potentially safety-related by identifying the applications which depend on the failed component. 

Lifeline infrastructure failures threaten school attendance Vulnerabilities in roads, bridges, and transportation systems must be prioritized when school attendance is threatened. 

Jonkeren, O. E., Ward, D., Dorneanu, B., Giannopoulos, G. Economic impact assessment of critical infrastructure failure in the EU a combined systems engineering-inoperability input-output model. 20th International Input-Output Conference, Bratislava, Slovakia, July 9-12, 2013. 

The consequence of moving consciously toward this model will be the provision of a robust and scalable IT infrastructure and systems able to cope with exponentially growing data mountains that will need to be integrated and shared, accessed and mined in the most effective way. It will also require formidable computing power and sophisticated algorithms to be able to simulate both organs and whole body systems to reduce expensive failures in the clinic and predict much earlier the pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic properties and toxicological and efficacy profiles of molecules in pharmaceu-... 

Advances in information technology and the necessity of improved efficiency have resulted in increasingly automated and interlinked infrastructures, and have created new vulnerabilities due to equipment failure, human error, weather and other natural... 

The defence departments also had to compete with political pressure for extra Exchequer funds to help to deal with the housing problem that had worsened during the war (when few houses were built), as well as to pay for health services and education. Churchill, when arguing in 1924 for a reduction in the naval estimates, referred to the need to spend money on social reform. Failure to do so, he warned, would lead to a Socialist victory in the next election, and greater cuts in naval expenditure. There were also pressures to build roads and to provide other social infrastructure. Between 1932/3 and 1938/9 civil expenditure of all kinds that had to be paid for out of the chancellor s budget increased by 70 million, or 20 per cent. ... 

There are six neoclassical roles of government (Wade 1990). Government should first, maintain macroeconomic stability second, provide physical infrastructure especially that which has fixed costs in relation to variable costs third, to supply public goods fourth, contribute to the development of institutions for improving the markets for labor, finance and technology fifth, offset or eliminate price distortions, which arise in cases of demonstrable market failure and sixth, redistribute income to the poorest in sufficient measure for them to meet basic needs. 

The hardware and software used to implement LIMS systems must be validated. Computers and networks need to be examined for potential impact of component failure on LIMS data. Security concerns regarding control of access to LIMS information must be addressed. Software, operating systems, and database management systems used in the implementation of LIMS systems must be validated to protect against data corruption and loss. Mechanisms for fault-tolerant operation and LIMS data backup and restoration should be documented and tested. One approach to validation of LIMS hardware and software is to choose vendors whose products are precertified however, the ultimate responsibility for validation remains with the user. Validating the LIMS system s operation involves a substantial amount of work, and an adequate validation infrastructure is a prerequisite for the construction of a dependable and flexible LIMS system. 

A single operator is also favorable in the case of network failures (for example during a compressor shutdown) as efficient coordination is required in order to secure the integrity of infrastructure as well as minimizing overall losses due to flow disturbances and gas quality deterioration. 

However, site services and infrastructure are not only a major driver of cost competitiveness. Some of the services are also crucial for improving plant effectiveness. Maintenance performance, for instance, can have a huge impact on plant output. Unplanned breakdowns, often caused by failure to implement the most effective maintenance strategy or by poor execution, can lead to as much as a 20 percent loss in overall equipment effectiveness (OEE see also Chapter 18). On the utilities side, significant cost advantages can be captured, e.g., by providing... 

The process of trying to divest or acquire a site services and infrastructure organization is a very tedious exercise, requiring thorough preparation, and with a very uncertain outcome. So far, a successful exit by a major chemical company is still up for realization and the recent failures raise the question of whether this path will be followed in the near future at all. 

The failure of an infrastructural systems can affect a single user (person or organization), or accumulate its negative effects up to the societal level. In this case and when the system that fails to deliver its intended output is providing a critical infrastructural service, it is possible to establish a direct link between CIP and security 0. 

Traditional accident models were devised to explain losses caused by failures of physical devices (chain or tree of failure events) in relatively simple systems. They are less useful for explaining accidents in software-intensive systems and for non-technical aspects of safety such as organizational culture and human decision-making. Creation of an infrastructure based on which safety analysis can function efficiently and effectively is needed. A so called safety culture for a development company and processes associated with routine tasks there, in general, is now identified as an area of root cause of accidents and that there is the greatest... 

Keywords Dependability Information Infrastructure Structure Failures Malicious Faults Systems-of-Systems... 

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