IS/IT outsourcing practices of small- and medium-sized manufacturers

Firms began outsourcing information system functions soon after the inception of electronic computing. Extant research has concentrated on large organizations and large-valued outsourcing contracts from a variety of different industries. Smaller-sized firms are inherently different from their large counterparts. These differences between small and large firms could lead to different information technology/information system (IT/IS) items being outsourced and different outsourcing agreements governing these arrangements. This research explores and examines the outsourcing practices of very small through to medium-sized manufacturing organizations. The in-depth case studies not only explored the extent to which different firms engaged in outsourcing but also the nuances of their outsourcing arrangements. The results reveal that all six firms tended to outsource the same sorts of functions. Some definite differences existed, however, in the strategies adopted in relation to the functions they outsourced. These differences arose for a variety of reasons, including size, locality, and holding company influences. The very small and small manufacturing firms tended to make outsourcing purchases on an ad hoc basis with little reliance on legal advice. In contrast, the medium-sized firms often used a more planned initiative and sought legal advice more often. Interestingly, not one of the six firms outsourced any of their transaction processing. These findings now give very small, small-, and medium-sized manufacturing firms the opportunity to compare their practices against other firms of similar size.

Implementation of a triple modular redundant FPGA based safety critical system for reliable software execution

This paper describes the implementation of a TMR (Triple Modular Redundant) microprocessor system on a FPGA. The system exhibits true redundancy in that three instances of the same processor system (both software and hardware) are executed in parallel. The described system uses software to control external peripherals and a voter is used to output correct results. An error indication is asserted whenever two of the three outputs match or all three outputs disagree. The software has been implemented to conform to a particular safety critical coding guideline/standard which is popular in industry. The system was verified by injecting various faults into it.

Low-cost real-time gesture recognition

A major impediment to developing real-time computer vision systems has been the computational power and level of skill required to process video streams in real-time. This has meant that many researchers have either analysed video streams off-line or used expensive dedicated hardware acceleration techniques. Recent software and hardware developments have greatly eased the development burden of realtime image analysis leading to the development of portable systems using cheap PC hardware and software exploiting the Multimedia Extension (MMX) instruction set of the Intel Pentium chip. This paper describes the implementation of a computationally efficient computer vision system for recognizing hand gestures using efficient coding and MMX-acceleration to achieve real-time performance on low cost hardware.

Interfacing ASM with the MDG tool

In this paper we describe an approach to interface Abstract State Machines (ASM) with Multiway Decision Graphs (MDG) to enable tool support for the formal verification of ASM descriptions. ASM is a specification method for software and hardware providing a powerful means of modeling various kinds of systems. MDGs are decision diagrams based on abstract representation of data and axe used primarily for modeling hardware systems. The notions of ASM and MDG axe hence closely related to each other, making it appealing to link these two concepts. The proposed interface between ASM and MDG uses two steps: first, the ASM model is transformed into a flat, simple transition system as an intermediate model. Second, this intermediate model is transformed into the syntax of the input language of the MDG tool, MDG-HDL. We have successfully applied this transformation scheme on a case study, the Island Tunnel Controller, where we automatically generated the corresponding MDG-HDL models from ASM specifications.