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Little is known about Chinese software development. In this paper, we report on the status of requirements management within six Chinese companies. We investigate the pre-implementation phases on business and engineering levels and documentation utilized within the whole development process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Structured and disciplined communication is a prerequisite for effective management of requirements. In this paper, we investigate what requirement management information is communicated within a software development cycle. We do this by studying the management of requirements information within one Canadian organization. Our results show that most of the information as designated in our template is recorded by the organization studied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Often, one connotes problem management with a postdelivery process for resolving problems within corrective maintenance. Very seldom, however, one relates it to the testing process within development, evolution and maintenance. In this paper, we propose a model of predelivery problem management. Using the model, we study the industrial status within eight companies situated in Greece. Our results show that all the organizations studied conduct a predelivery problem management process within system testing. However, only three out of eight companies perform it within central integration testing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the state of practice of integrating risk management with software development in 37 software organizations. We do this by using a set of evaluation criteria covering various process integration aspects. Our results recognize that process integration in this domain is still in its infancy. There is a great need for process integration and process integration models within the industry studied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Congested roads seem to be an unavoidable characteristic of large cities. Transport economists and planners have regularly suggested that road pricing would be an appropriate and effective instrument in an overall policy to relieve congestion. Politicians and the public at large have usually been quite sceptical, however. In this paper, three ex ante studies of transport and location effects of alternative road pricing systems are presented and compared. Different models estimated with different data sets are applied to calculate the effects. The first two studies deal with the effects on the traffic pattern of a zone-based and a distance-based road pricing system for the Stockholm area, respectively. In the third study, location effects are also included in an analysis of optimal congestion charges in a stylised symmetric city adjusted to resemble Stockholm. All studies indicate a substantial reduction in vehicle distance travelled. For the zone-based system, traffic volumes in the inner city of Stockholm are predicted to decrease by 30% for charged hours at a charge level equivalent to 3 SEK/km. For the distance-based system, traffic volumes in the inner city are predicted to be reduced by 35 and 19% at charge levels of 4 and 2 SEK/km for peak and office hours, respectively. For the case of optimal congestion pricing, the reduction is 25% at an average charge level of 2 SEK/km. Additional effects in the first study are that speed might increase on inner city roads and arterials by around 20%. Moreover, accessibility to activities in the other half of the city will be reduced significantly. The most affected relation is the one between inner northern and inner southern suburbs. In that case, a reduction of the number of vehicle trips by around 30% is predicted. In spite of quite substantial transport effects, the location effects are predicted to be very limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reliable transport infrastructure systems are vital for the functioning of modern societies. People in their everyday lives, as well as trade and industry, plan their activities on the assumption that it is possible to travel and to transport goods between different places in a fast, safe and predictable way. Over time the development of the transport infrastructure has allowed people and goods to be transported at higher speeds. This has contributed, for good or bad, to a spatial reorganisation of many human activities on a local as well as a global geographical scale. Transport systems, as all technical systems, are more or less reliable, however. This is an important aspect of the quality of transport services, which may have spatial implications. In many big cities capacity shortages lead to congestion and unreliable transports that hamper the development. In rural areas lack of alternative transport routes, in case the main route has to be closed for some reason, contributes to make these areas less attractive for location. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vulnerability, exposure and criticality in various infrastructures are issues that have been more explicitly looked into in recent years. However, road vulnerability as such has not been in focus for very long, despite the fundamental importance of our road networks in everyday life, as well as in crisis evacuation situations. Consequently, network reliability in transport modelling is an important and growing field of research (Lam 1999). The connection between reliability, vulnerability and other related concepts are discussed in Berdica (2002), with the main proposition that vulnerability analysis of road networks should be regarded as an overall framework, within which different transport studies can be performed to describe how well our transport systems function when exposed to different kinds of disturbances. Following that approach, this paper presents the results from a model-based case study, performed with the overall objective to study how vulnerable the Stockholm road network is in different respects. More specifically it is built up around three main questions: 1.How do interruptions of different critical links affect the system and how important are these links in relation to one another?2.How is the network performance affected by general capacity reductions and possible prioritisation of a sub-network?3.How is the system affected by traffic demand variations, i.e. how close to its capacity limit does the system operate? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Control-volume (cv) and node-based (cell-vertex) finite volume discretizations of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations are compared in terms of accuracy, efficiency, and stability using the inviscid Taylor vortex problem. An energy estimate is shown to exist for both formulations, and stable convective boundary conditions are formulated using the simultaneous approximation term (SAT) method. Numerical experiments show the node-based formulation to be generally superior on both structured Cartesian and unstructured triangular grids, displaying consistent error levels and nearly second-order rates of L2 velocity error reduction. The cv-formulation, however, out-performs the node-based for the case of Cartesian grids when the Taylor vortices do not cut the boundary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current practice in grid programming uses message passing, which unfortunately leads to code that is difficult to understand, debug and optimize. Hence, for grids to become commonly accepted, also as general-purpose parallel computation platforms, suitable parallel programming environments need to be developed. In this paper we propose an approach to realize a distributed shared memory programming environment for computational grids called GridNestStep, by adopting NestStep, a structured parallel programming language based on the Bulk Synchronous Parallel model of parallel computation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Toxoplasma gondii is an important intracellular protozoan that is the causative agent of toxoplasmosis in humans and animals. Toxoplasmosis is a zoonosis and is normally caught by eating undercooked infected meat or by ingestion of oocysts excreted by its definitive host, the cat. It is responsible for abortion and congenital defects in humans and is an important cause of abortion in domestic livestock, especially sheep, goats, and pigs. Infection in farm animals poses a risk to public health, as well as causing economic losses to the farming industry. T. gondii infection is established by rapid multiplication of the tachyzoite stage of the parasite. Although generally effective, the immune response does not completely eliminate the parasite; instead the tachyzoites differentiate into bradyzoites that form quiescent cysts in the brain and other tissues causing chronic infection that persists for the lifetime of the host (1). Infection with T. gondii is extremely common (20-80% prevalence in Europe and North America), but the majority of people show no overt clinical symptoms. Immunosuppression, however, rapidly leads to the breakdown of the tissue cysts, recrudescence of infection, and development of toxoplasmic encephalitis (TE). Since no drugs are available that are effective against chronic infection, the tissue cysts remain a life-long risk for reactivation of acute toxoplasmosis. TE is one of the major opportunistic infections of the central nervous system, it is rapidly progressive and fatal if not treated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]