IMPORTANCE OF TRACK DESIGN IN GROUND TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS.

The development of the tracks for the Tracked Hovercraft and Bliss Pendair Systems is described. Comment is made on the relative importance of track and suspension costs and of the need for tracks that are weather, vandal and noise proof. It is argued that the beam section required for a suspended air cushion is more likely to fit these requirements than that for beam riding vehicles, either air-cushion or magnetically suspended.

The design and implementation of dialogue control in voice operated database inquiry systems

This paper describes work performed as part of the U.K. Alvey sponsored Voice Operated Database Inquiry System (VODIS) project in the area of intelligent dialogue control. The principal aims of the work were to develop a habitable interface for the untrained user; to investigate the degree to which dialogue control can be used to compensate for deficiencies in recognition performance; and to examine the requirements on dialogue control for generating natural speech output. A data-driven methodology is described based on the use of frames in which dialogue topics are organized hierarchically. The concept of a dynamically adjustable scope is introduced to permit adaptation to recognizer performance and the use of historical and hierarchical contexts are described to facilitate the construction of contextually relevant output messages. © 1989.

Data structures and software tools for the computer aided design of control systems: a survey.

CAD software can be structured as a set of modular 'software tools' only if there is some agreement on the data structures which are to be passed between tools. Beyond this basic requirement, it is desirable to give the agreed structures the status of 'data types' in the language used for interactive design. The ultimate refinement is to have a data management capability which 'understands' how to manipulate such data types. In this paper the requirements of CACSD are formulated from the point of view of Database Management Systems. Progress towards meeting these requirements in both the DBMS and the CACSD community is reviewed. The conclusion reached is that there has been considerable movement towards the realisation of software tools for CACSD, but that this owes more to modern ideas about programming languages, than to DBMS developments. The DBMS field has identified some useful concepts, but further significant progress is expected to come from the exploitation of concepts such as object-oriented programming, logic programming, or functional programming.