There are many interacting factors aecting the performance of a total hip replacement (THR), such as prosthesis design and material properties, applied loads, surgical approach, femur size and quality, interface conditions etc. All these factors are subject to variation and ther…
The Earth’s surface bears the scars of 4.5 billion years of bombardment by asteroids, despite most having been erased by tectonic activity and erosion. Asteroids predominantly orbit the Sun in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but a large number occupy orbits close to …
The concept of competency is increasingly important since it conceptualises intended learning outcomes within the process of acquiring and updating knowledge. A competency model is critical to successfully managing assessment and achieving the goals of resource sharing, collabor…
In the software engineering world, many modelling notations and languages have been developed to aid application development. The technologies, Java and Web services, play an increasingly important role in web applications. However, because of issues of complexity, it is difficu…
Technologies such as Web Services, the Semantic Web and the Grid may give rise to new electronic service markets, which have so many services, providers and consumers that software agents need to be employed to search and configure the services for their users. To this end, in t…
Multi-agent systems draw together a number of significant trends in modern technology: ubiquity, decentralisation, openness, dynamism and uncertainty. As work in these fields develops, such systems face increasing challenges. Two particular challenges are decision making in unce…
This engineering doctorate concerns the application of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology to some of the challenges faced in the design of next generation communications networks. The growth and convergence of such networks has fuelled demand for higher bandwidth sy…
Having started off from luxury makes and models, in-vehicle navigation systems are now gradually spreading through the entire vehicle fleet, as drivers appreciate their usefulness. Increasingly sophisticated systems are being developed, having much more advanced functions than s…
There is a requirement for systems methodologies and approaches that can cope with real life information systems that are subject to changing situations and therefore changing requirements. This has not been achieved previously and has seen a gap open up between information syst…
Mobile wireless ad hoc networks (MANETs) have become of increasing interest in view of their promise to extend connectivity beyond traditional fixed infrastructure networks. In MANETs, the task of routing is distributed among network nodes which act as both end points and router…
The back end of a compiler performs machine-dependent tasks and low-level optimisations that are laborious to implement and difficult to debug. In addition, in languages that require run-time services such as garbage collection, the back end must interface with the run-time syst…
Computer systems play an increasingly crucial and ubiquitous role in human endeavour by carrying out or facilitating tasks and providing information and services. How much work these systems can accomplish, within a certain amount of time, using a certain amount of resources, ch…
As roads become busier and automotive technology improves, there is considerable potential for driver assistance systems to improve the safety of road users. Longitudinal collision warning and collision avoidance systems are starting to appear on production cars to assist driver…
This thesis focuses on the issue of people in software maintenance and, in particular, on software immigrants – developers who are joining maintenance teams to work with large unfamiliar software systems. By means of a structured literature review this thesis identifies a lack o…
Privacy, an everyday topic with weekly media coverage of loss of personal records, faces its bigger risk during the uncontrolled, involuntary or inadvertent disclosure and collection of personal and sensitive information. Preserving one's privacy while e-shopping, especially whe…
Worms are malicious programs that spread over the Internet without human intervention. Since worms generally spread faster than humans can respond, the only viable defence is to automate their detection. Network intrusion detection systems typically detect worms by examining pac…
Reacting flows interacting with liquid droplets are of practical and scientific importance due to their appearance in a multiplicity of industrial and domestic applications such as fire suppression systems and humidified gas turbines. Experimental measurements are usually limite…
The PROB model checker [LB03] provides tool support for an integrated formal specification approach, which combines the state-based B specification language [Abr96] with the event-based process algebra CSP [Hoa78]. The JCSP package [WM00b] presents a concurrent Java implementati…
We introduce a hybrid model for the evaluation of jet noise. The model uses the information from a solution of the Reynolds-averaged Navier{Stokes equations (RANS). It evaluates the jet-noise power spectral density (PSD) in the quiescent region outside the turbulent jet. It incl…