Enabling industrial scale simulation / emulation models

OLE Process Control (OPC) is an industry standard that facilitates the communication between PCs and Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC). This communication allows for the testing of control systems with an emulation model. When models require faster and higher volume communications, limitations within OPC prevent this. In this paper an interface is developed to allow high speed and high volume communications between a PC and PLC enabling the emulation of larger and more complex control systems and their models. By switching control of elements within the model between the model engine and the control system it is possible to use the model to validate the system design, test the real world control systems and visualise real world operation.

Fuzzy logic for decision support in chronic care

Computerized clinical guidelines can provide significant benefits in terms of health outcomes and costs, however, their effective computer implementation presents significant problems. Vagueness and ambiguity inherent in natural language (textual) clinical guidelines makes them problematic for formulating automated alerts or advice. Fuzzy logic allows us to formalize the treatment of vagueness in a decision support architecture. In care plan on-line (CPOL), an intranet-based chronic disease care planning system for general practitioners (GPs) in use in South Australia, we formally treat fuzziness in interpretation of quantitative data, formulation of recommendations and unequal importance of clinical indicators. We use expert judgment on cases, as well as direct estimates by experts, to optimize aggregation operators and treat heterogeneous combinations of conjunction and disjunction that are present in the natural language decision rules formulated by specialist teams.

Macleod and the offence of defrauding the company in one-person businesses: the divergence between legal principle and logic widens

The recent High Court decision in Macleod v R establishes that a director and sole shareholder may be convicted of fraudulently applying a company's property even though the person has consented to the personal use of the company's property. It is contended that while this decision is consistent with the weight of precedent, it is wrong in principle. The decision implies that corporations are not only separate legal entities, but that they are highly virtuous legal entities -- incapable of being imbued with the dishonest intentions and activities of the individuals controlling the company.

Fuzzy logic based metric in software testing

How to provide cost-effective strategies for Software Testing has been one of the research focuses in Software Engineering for a long time. Many researchers in Software Engineering have addressed the effectiveness and quality metric of Software Testing, and many interesting results have been obtained. However, one issue of paramount importance in software testing – the intrinsic imprecise and uncertain relationships within testing metrics – is left unaddressed. To this end, a new quality and effectiveness measurement based on fuzzy logic is proposed. The software quality features and analogy-based reasoning are discussed, which can deal with quality and effectiveness consistency between different test projects. Experimental results are also provided to verify the proposed measurement.

Highly programmable surface

A highly programmable electro-mechanical surface is developed using an effective array of individual pins arranged in a gridform. Each pin can be independently raised or lowered to create a wide range of contoured surfaces. It was found that as the number of elements increased. high levels of accuracy could still be achieved. however the required processing power increased logarithmically. This finding was attributed to the large amounts of data being passed. and subsequently led to a second focus; various methods of data management and flow control techniques within large-scale multi elemental systems. Results indicated a large potential for highly programmable surfaces within industry to provide a computer controlled surface for rapid prototyping. The research also revealed the potential for such a device to be used as a HID within Haptic applications.

A fuzzy logic based approach for software testing

How to provide cost-effective strategies for Software Testing has been one of the research focuses in Software Engineering for a long time. Many researchers in Software Engineering have addressed the effectiveness and quality metric of Software Testing, and many interesting results have been obtained. However, one issue of paramount importance in software testing — the intrinsic imprecise and uncertain relationships within testing metrics — is left unaddressed. To this end, a new quality and effectiveness measurement based on fuzzy logic is proposed. Related issues like the software quality features and fuzzy reasoning for test project similarity measurement are discussed, which can deal with quality and effectiveness consistency between different test projects. Experiments were conducted to verify the proposed measurement using real data from actual software testing projects. Experimental results show that the proposed fuzzy logic based metrics is effective and efficient to measure and evaluate the quality and effectiveness of test projects.

Logic games

Discusses innovations on logic games which will develop the problem solving and spatial thinking of students. Variations of existing logic games; Description of the innovated games; Advice on introducing logic games to students.

Fuzzy logic in clinical practice decision support systems

Computerized clinical guidelines can provide significant benefits to health outcomes and costs, however, their effective implementation presents significant problems. Vagueness and ambiguity inherent in natural (textual) clinical guidelines is not readily amenable to formulating automated alerts or advice. Fuzzy logic allows us to formalize the treatment of vagueness in a decision support architecture. This paper discusses sources of fuzziness in clinical practice guidelines. We consider how fuzzy logic can be applied and give a set of heuristics for the clinical guideline knowledge engineer for addressing uncertainty in practice guidelines. We describe the specific applicability of fuzzy logic to the decision support behavior of Care Plan On-Line, an intranet-based chronic care planning system for General Practitioners.

Lessons from arts experiences for service-dominant logic

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to consider whether art experiences can inform service-dominant logic (SDL) discourse through an exploration of the co-production and co-creation processes of art experiences.

Design/methodology/approach – Empirical knowledge gained about art experiences is analysed to identify emergent themes about co-production and co-creation. Four modes of qualitative data collection are employed: research participant diaries, photo elicitation, in depth interviews and focus groups.

Findings – Key findings are there are three stakeholders involved in the co-creation of art experiences, which all have critical and different roles; co-creation and co-production are both temporally based and evolving and there are points where they interact and intersect; and high levels of engagement in co-production enhance individuals' contribution to the co-creation of positive value and make their participation in future co-production opportunities more likely.

Research limitations/implications – The paper is exploratory and not a general population study. The methodology and sample of participants employed do not allow for the generalisation of the findings to the broader population.

Practical implications – Organisations may benefit from devising strategies to encourage greater dialogue and connection between all stakeholders involved in co-production and co-creation. The higher the level of individuals' co-production of art experiences the greater likelihood of positive value being co-created. Furthermore, the greater the possibility of individuals engaging in other co-production experiences in the future. While individuals are attracted to co-production possibilities, there are factors that are external to an experience that can act as either barriers to or facilitators of co-production, and that consequently impact on co-creation.

Originality/value – There is little extant research that explores the applicability of art experiences to SDL. This paper is significant in that it employs empirical research methods to develop knowledge on the topic. Furthermore, this paper is innovative in that it seeks to see whether the art experiences can inform generic marketing models, rather than whether generic marketing models can inform arts marketing.