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Failure of critical computer systems could result in death, injury, financial loss and damage to the environment. To help address this concern, academic staff at City University London have developed an approach to assurance case construction to demonstrate that the risk posed by critical computer systems is acceptably low. Initially the primary focus was the justification of safety-related systems in UK industry (i.e., by introducing more structure and rigour) but it has been extended to cover other aspects such as reliability and security and has been taken up internationally. This approach has been commercialised by a company with close links to City University London (Adelard LLP). The approach is used in critical areas including:
Industry feedback has been positive and our assurance approach, in the form of updated regulations and procedures, has been adopted as standard practice in these sectors. This has led to significant and wide-ranging impact on practice and the consequent safety and security of systems, benefiting both the industries concerned and the public who use or are affected by their services.
The development, review and acceptance of an explicit 'safety case' forms a key component of the assurance and regulation of many safety critical systems, including those in the nuclear, defence, railway, automotive, medical device, and process industries. Industrial practice in safety case development prior to York's development of the Goal Structuring Notation (GSN) relied almost exclusively upon narrative text to communicate the safety argument within the safety case. This approach suffered from problems of lack of clarity, difficulty in comprehension, poor structure, and limited formalised development of 'case law' in safety argumentation. GSN was developed and matured by York to tackle these problems directly, and is now used internationally by safety critical industries in a large number of domains including defence, transport, nuclear and medical devices.
Newcastle University's fundamental research into the theory of concurrency and the automated construction and analysis of asynchronous systems has resulted in novel technologies that have been adopted and applied worldwide by industry. This case study describes impact over the last five years on the industrial development of asynchronous microprocessor chips, in particular, deployed by Intel for handling financial transactions on NYSE and NASDAQ (with combined daily volume of trade exceeding £80 billion), and the improvements in business process analysis through the world-leading open-source ProM tools (downloaded over 65,000 times since 2008, and used by a number of major organisations, e.g. ING Bank and Deloitte).
Newcastle University's fundamental research into the automated synthesis of asynchronous systems and metastability analysis has resulted in new technologies that have been adopted worldwide by the microprocessor industry and educational sectors. In particular, Newcastle's asynchronous design methods and tools based on Petri nets have been used by the industry leading vendor Intel Corporation for their switch silicon technology, on which most transactions on the NYSE and NASDAQ (with combined daily volume of trade exceeding £80 billion) now rely. Oracle Corporation used the results of Newcastle's metastability analysis research for building their SPARC series of servers, marketed as having "world's fastest microprocessor".
This case is based on economic impact. It shows how research by Professor Michael Wooldridge at the University of Liverpool on the Gaia Methodology for agent-oriented software engineering improved the performance of the Swiss company Whitestein Technologies AG and of international users of its key product. Specifically, the research enabled Whitestein to develop its business process management system (BPM) Living Systems Process Suite which delivers several million pounds per year of revenues, corresponding to 50% of their total business revenues. Users of Whitestein's Living Systems Process Suite since 2008 include Daimler AG, Transcor Astra Group, Vienna Insurance Group, and the US Department of Veterans Affairs. In 2010 Gartner, the world's leading IT advisory company, recognized the impact and innovation of the Living Systems Process Suite by naming Whitestein a Cool Vendor in BPM.
Research in machine virtualisation conducted in the Cambridge Computer Laboratory from 1999 onwards provides the basis for much of the present day Cloud.
Xen is a virtual machine monitor that supports execution of multiple guest operating systems consuming little overhead and providing resource isolation. This was prototyped in the Laboratory and led to XenSource, a spin-out company, which was founded in 2005. XenSource was acquired in 2007 by Citrix Systems for US$500M, and products that were launched from December 2007 onwards have had a profound impact throughout the period. Xen is now used on millions of machines around the world, providing deployment flexibility and savings on power. It forms the basis of Citrix XenServer and Amazon's Elastic Cloud 2.
This case study concerns the design and methodology adopted in the construction of high reliability (safety-critical and real-time) embedded systems, particularly as applied in the automotive and avionics industry. The key impact has been for the automotive and avionics industry to adopt a change in the way these systems are designed, leading to more reliable systems, faster time to market, lower production and verification costs, and lower maintenance costs.
The subject matter concerns the fundamental architecture of high reliability embedded systems. Specifically it is a paradigm shift in the theoretical design of the software and hardware from established event-driven architectures to novel time-triggered architectures developed at the University of Leicester (UoL). The novel paradigm is supported by a range of development tools, processor designs, and diagnostic/maintenance tools developed by a spin-out company, TTE Systems Ltd. Research was exploited commercially by TTE Systems Ltd to provide economic impact via software tools sales, consultancy services, bespoke product development, and training courses.
The volume and diversity of data that companies need to handle are increasing exponentially. In order to compete effectively and ensure companies' commercial sustainability, it is becoming crucial to achieve robust traceability in both their data and the evolving designs of their systems. The CRISTAL software addresses this. It was originally developed at CERN, with substantial contributions from UWE Bristol, for one of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments, and has been transferred into the commercial world. Companies have been able to demonstrate increased agility, generate additional revenue, and improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness with which they develop and implement systems in various areas, including business process management (BPM), healthcare and accounting applications. CRISTAL's ability to manage data and their provenance at the terabyte scale, with full traceability over extended timescales, based on its description-driven approach, has provided the adaptability required to future proof dynamically evolving software for these businesses.
This case study embodies a non-linear relationship between underpinning research, software development and deployment. It involves computer science research at UWE in conjunction with its applied development for the world's largest particle physics laboratory and onward deployment commercially into private sector industry.
Research into the operational characteristics and applicability of biological reaction networks, carried out at the university in collaboration with groups at Caltech and Sony Systems, revealed the pressing need for a standard format that could be used for storage and exchange of mathematical models of such systems. Hertfordshire researchers played a crucial role in the initial design, dissemination and early exploitation of the Systems Biology Markup Language, SBML, now recognised as the de facto standard format for this purpose. Several major scientific publishers operating across academic boundaries require their authors to use SBML, and 254 software tools, including MATLAB and Mathematica, are now SBML-compliant. Online forums testify to a sizeable, international user-developer community that encompasses engineers, biologists, mathematicians and software developers.
Research in organisational decision making has led to the establishment of a Sentencing Information System for the Republic of Ireland (ISIS) which enables judges, lawyers and the public to access information on sentencing patterns within the Republic of Ireland. "ISIS enables Judges and others engaged in the sentencing process... to develop their knowledge and understanding of sentencing practices. This ...benefits the understanding of defendants and witnesses, including victims of the entire process. All of this is being done without jeopardizing judicial independence and impartiality" (Source 9). With 7000 user visits annually from 84 different countries, ISIS has international impact on increasing the transparency of judicial decision-making, is widely regarded as a particularly significant development in legal processes, has stimulated public discussion on sentencing patterns and is informing public policy in the management of the criminal justice system.