School of EEITM University of Surrey Guildford, Surrey GU2 5XH, UK

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Issue No. 5 January 1996

An Occasional Briefing for the Safety Critical Round Table

The University's role in knowledge acquisition and animation was completed with the delivery of the report for tasks 5 and 6 of the project. There will be a shift in emphasis in the work now with the University focussing on the dissemination of project results and Wallingford taking on board the further development of the Safe-DIS system.

At September's Round Table meeting members were given a demonstration of 'Crystal Ball' a commercially available risk analysis package with apparent potential as a tool for safe design. A discussion followed the demonstration during which ways that the software could be used to give insights into underlying equations and parameter sensitivity were identified. The issue of Plain English was once again raised. The Round Table were shown a system developed at Surrey which checks documents for clarity in texts accordaning to guidelines produced by the Plain English Campaign. There was also a further knowledge acquisition session pertaining to the determination of a model's suitability for a given task. The next meeting of the Round Table is scheduled for February 6.

In the between time we have begun a series of on site workshops at the Water Companies represented by the Round Table these are detailed later in this newsletter.

In August Andrew and Steve from the University visited John Hateley at Walsall Metropolitan Council to conduct some tape recorded interviews. In addition to the knowledge acquired through the interviews the visit also gave the members of the Safe-DIS team some useful insights into the 'real-world' of network modelling.

The project review meeting in October was attended by both Dr Bob Sugden representing the DTI and Dr Dominic Semple from EPSRC. They were given a presentation of the report produced for tasks 5 and 6 of the project 'The Acquisition and Animation of Safety-Related Knowledge'. This describes the knowledge gathered and software prototyped thus far in the project. They were also given demonstrations of this software.

With regards making contacts with other DTI/EPSRC projects letters have been sent to a number of co-workers from the RED, DGKBIS, Rule-Based Systems, StAR, Communications in safety cases, MORSE, Safe-SAM, and ROBUST projects. In particular we were interested to learn more about the StAR project which deals with qualitative risk analysis for problems which are too complex to capture in terms of simple probabilities.

Since the last newsletter a paper has been prepared for the International Conference of Urban Storm Drainage to be held in Hannover, September 1996. (The abstract of this paper had been previously accepted for presentation at the conference).

WaPUG 1995

In November two members of the Safe-DIS team attended WaPUG 1995 (Waste water Planning Users Group) along with approximately 200 drainage engineers and technical suppliers. Prior to the main conference, 2 demonstrations of the Safe-DIS system were given to audiences of about 25 people invited by Wallingford. Later, Andrew gave a talk to the main conference and received some encouraging feedback from people who visited the Wallingford stand where we gave some further demonstrations.

Safe-DIS Mobile Workshops

On 15 December, two members of the Safe-DIS team visited Thames Water along with Dr Roland Price. The day began with an introductory session in which Jas Mann outlined the Safe-DIS project to an audience of 15 or so Thames Water staff of various levels. Roland then spoke about Wallingford's role in the project. The session concluded with an overview of the Safe-DIS system functionality and some description of the role the Round Table has played in the project.

This was followed by a series of 'one-to-one' demonstrations of the Safe-DIS system to Thames personnel, lasting into the afternoon.

We received some both encouraging and challenging feedback in the course of the day. A particular issue was the notion of model auditing and how facilities might be incorporated into the Safe-DIS system. The idea of model auditing has now been incorporated into the Implementation report and was discussed at some length at the recent Safe-DIS review meeting.

The next water company visit is set for Wednesday 14 February at North West Water with a visit to Severn Trent provisionally scheduled for March.

The Implementation Specification Report

Version 1 of the Implementation Report for Task 7 of the project is complete and was presented at the last review. This document describes and evaluates the methods employed for knowledge acquisition used in Safe-DIS and the ways in which this knowledge has been utilised in the Safe-DIS information systems.

The report concludes with guidelines for the continued development of the Safe-DIS system, the responsibility for which lies primarily with Wallingford Software.

'Safety Systems'

Members of the Safe-DIS Round Table and others associated with Safe-DIS might be interested to learn of a newsletter produced by the Safety-Critical Systems Club, called, 'Safety Systems'. This publication describes a variety of work which address safety-critical issues in a whole host of domains. For more information about the newsletter and the club contact:

Joan Atkinson

Centre for Software Reliability

University of Newcastle upon Tyne

NE1 7RU

Tel: 0191 221 2222

Fax: 0191 222 7995

email: Joan.Atkinson@newcastle.ac.uk

Research Interests

Multi-agent Architectures

We have been continuing our research into how multi-agent architectures can be applied to the management of the diverse knowledge and information sources that must be brought to bear in modelling tasks.

In our work we have hypothesised that the problems and opportunities to the use of simulation models can be related to constraint mechanisms. Moreover, our experimentation has demonstrated the role of constraints in agent interactions; (i) in allocating tasks in multi-agent situations (ii) for the consideration given to time in allocating tasks and (iii) the resolution of conflicts that may arise in multiple agent situations.

We have presented and published a paper titled "Multi-agent systems in modelling and simulation" at WOz 95 (International Workshop on Oz Programming), Martigny, Switzerland (Nov. 29th - Dec. 1st 1995). This paper concerns the role of agents and constraints in modelling and simulation.

Knowledge Acquisition and Animation

The methodology for knowledge acquisition and knowledge animation which has been developed in the course of the Safe-DIS project is being described in a paper which will be submitted to an AI / Expert System journal.

Language of Safety

Recently our attention has been drawn to the work being carried out in the StAR project, also under the SCS programme. This work concerns the 'definition' of linguistic terms to be used in qualitative risk analysis. Qualitative risk analysis is most applicable to complex systems and procedures, e.g. modelling and simulation, in which the calculation of simple numerical measures of risk is impossible. The definition and use of terms such as possible and probable is of interest to our linguistic inquiries since they are fundamental to discourses on risk and safety.