Formal Scheduling Research Articles

Formal Modeling and Verification of Embedded Real-Time Systems: An Approach and Practical Tool Based on Constraint Time Petri Nets

Modeling and verification of the correct behavior of embedded real-time systems with strict timing constraints is a well-known and important problem. Failing to fulfill a deadline in system operation can have severe consequences in the practical case. This paper proposes an approach to formal modeling and schedulability analysis. A novel extension of Petri Nets named Constraint Time Petri Nets (C-TPN) is developed, which enables the modeling of a collection of interdependent real-time tasks whose execution is constrained by the use of priority and shared resources like processors and memory data. A C-TPN model is reduced to a network of Timed Automata in the context of the popular Uppaal toolbox. Both functional and, most importantly, temporal properties can be assessed by exhaustive model checking and/or statistical model checking based on simulations. This paper first describes and motivates the proposed C-TPN modeling language and its formal semantics. Then, a Uppaal translation is shown. Finally, three models of embedded real-time systems are considered, and their properties are thoroughly verified.

How to respond when patients invoke a diagnosis for themselves: Evidence from a nurse’s response practices in personality disorder interviews

ABSTRACT What is going on when a psychiatric patient claims a psychiatric diagnosis for themselves which is different from the one a practitioner is investigating? We analyze cases from 10 interviews between psychiatric patients and a nurse using a formal interview schedule to assess whether the patient has a personality disorder. When the patient invokes (temporary) depression to explain some of their experiences or life circumstances, the nurse then has to handle that, while dispassionately pursuing an interview schedule that is, on the contrary, predicated on the diagnosis being a long-term personality disorder. We show how the nurse balances respect for the patient’s account while also performing her institutional duties. The data are in Finnish.

Scheduling practices for pregnant emergency medicine residents.

Night shift work is associated with adverse pathophysiologic effects on maternal and fetal well-being. Although emergency medicine (EM) residents work frequent night shifts, there is no existing guidance for residency program directors (PDs) regarding scheduling pregnant residents. Our study assessed scheduling practices for pregnant EM residents, differences based on program and PD characteristics, barriers and attitudes toward implementing a formal scheduling policy, and PDs' awareness of literature describing adverse effects of night shifts on maternal-fetal outcomes. We conducted an anonymous, web-based survey of U.S. EM residencies (N= 276). Quantitative data were summarized; chi-square analysis and logistic regression were used to assess relationships between program and PD characteristics and schedule accommodations. Qualitative description was used to analyze an open-ended question, organizing findings into major and minor themes. Of the 167 completed surveys (response rate 61%), 67% of programs reported no formal policy for scheduling pregnant residents but made adjustments on an individual basis including block changes (85%), decreased (46%) or no night shifts (34%), and working shifts earlier in pregnancy to cover later shifts (20%). Barriers to adjustments included staffing constraints (60%), equity concerns (45%), or impact on wellness (41%) among all residents and privacy (28%). PDs endorsed scheduling adjustments as important (mean 8.1, 0-10 scale) and reported guidance from graduate medical education governance would be useful (60%). Larger program size, but not PD gender or proportion of female residents, was associated with an increased likelihood of scheduling modifications. Twenty-five percent of PDs reported little knowledge of literature regarding night shift work and pregnancy. Qualitative themes supported quantitative findings. Most EM residency programs do not have formal scheduling policies for pregnant residents, but most PDs support making adjustments and do so informally. More education and guidance for PDs are needed to promote the development of formal policies.

Upaya Mengasah Kecerdasan Linguistik dan Interpersonal melalui Program Trainer Muda

The general public's view of the meaning of intelligence is still narrow. Many think that intelligent children are children who have logical intelligence and those who are lacking in that are considered unintelligent, even though there are many other types of intelligence. Some of these intelligences are linguistic and interpersonal intelligence. One way to hone linguistic and interpersonal intelligence is through a youth trainer program. The purpose of this research is to find out about the youth trainer program, how to hone linguistic and interpersonal intelligence through the youth trainer program, and what are the supporting and inhibiting factors. This research is a qualitative research using a case study approach. Data collection techniques using observation, interviews, and documentation. In the interview process, the researchers obtained data from the training division, teachers, administrators and students. Data analysis technique by reducing data, presenting data and drawing conclusions. The technique of checking the validity of the data by extending participation and triangulation. The conclusion of the research is that through the young trainer program, the students' linguistic and interpersonal intelligence has been proven to be honed. The supporting factors in this research are: imagination map, peer tutoring, teaching flash students etc. The inhibiting factor: training activities sometimes clash with the formal school schedule, the varying abilities of students and the lack of self-motivation of some students.

Importance of Billing and Coding Education in Residency Training Programs

Residency training across specialties is based on gaining clinical knowledge in the field, developing diagnostic acumen, mastering appropriate use of therapeutic options, and increasing surgical experience. Traditionally, residency programs are evaluated on their ability to ensure specific numbers of patient encounters and minimum surgical volumes, a formal schedule of didactic sessions, and clinical exposures to related subspecialties. A resident’s competency is confirmed based on measurable outcomes. However, a successful transition to clinical practice requires various other skills. These skills include the ability to lead a team of support staff and allied health professionals, provide high-quality health care at an economical price while following government regulations and private insurance policies, and do all of this in an environment that fosters teamwork, efficiency, and collaboration, and economic security. This is a vital component of proper billing and coding to comply with Medicare, Medicaid, and commercial payer regulations. These skills should be considered part of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) terms systems-based learning.

Scheduling of Missions with Constrained Tasks for Heterogeneous Robot Systems

We present a formal tasK AllocatioN and scheduling apprOAch for multi-robot missions (KANOA). KANOA supports two important types of task constraints: task ordering, which requires the execution of several tasks in a specified order; and joint tasks, which indicates tasks that must be performed by more than one robot. To mitigate the complexity of robotic mission planning, KANOA handles the allocation of the mission tasks to robots, and the scheduling of the allocated tasks separately. To that end, the task allocation problem is formalised in first-order logic and resolved using the Alloy model analyzer, and the task scheduling problem is encoded as a Markov decision process and resolved using the PRISM probabilistic model checker. We illustrate the application of KANOA through a case study in which a heterogeneous robotic team is assigned a hospital maintenance mission.

Inclusive internationalisation: do different (social) groups of students need different internationalisation activities?

ABSTRACT For a long time, internationalisation strategies of higher education institutions across the world focused on international student mobility. However, international student mobility is a socially selective process, whereby students from lower socio-economic backgrounds are less likely to participate. Consequently, in recent years ‘internationalisation for all’, ‘inclusive internationalisation’ and ‘internationalisation at home’ have become prominent terms in internationalisation strategies, aiming to provide internationalisation activities to all students, including those who remain at home. To our surprise, however, existing scholarship today did not investigate whether offering a broader array of internationalisation activities also reaches the objectives of such new internationalisation strategies, namely to reach a broader group of students, including those from traditionally disadvantaged backgrounds. To this end, in this paper, we investigate the likelihood of different (social) groups to participate in different internationalisation activities, both at home and abroad, through an online survey conducted in 2019 at three institutions in Belgium and the Netherlands (n = 2567). Our findings clearly indicate that the social composition of student populations needs to be taken into account when designing internationalisation strategies. Our results indicate that simply broadening the type of activities is not sufficient, as students from lower socio-economic backgrounds showed to be less likely to participate in any internationalisation activity. Overall, the findings suggest that inclusive internationalisation might best be reached through integrating internationalisation into the formal curriculum, in order to circumvent the barriers that might exist to participate in activities outside of the formal study schedule.

The Influence of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Intensivists’ Well-Being: A Qualitative Study

BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic has strained health care systems and has resulted in widespread critical care staffing shortages, negatively impacting the quality of care delivered.Research QuestionHow have hospitals’ emergency responses to the pandemic influenced the well-being of frontline intensivists, and do any potential strategies exist to improve their well-being and to help preserve the critical care workforce?Study Design and MethodsWe conducted semistructured interviews of intensivists at clusters of tertiary and community hospitals located in six regions across the United States between August and November 2020 using the “four S” framework of acute surge planning (ie, space, staff, stuff, and system) to organize the interview guide. We then used inductive thematic analysis to identify themes describing the influence of hospitals’ emergency responses on intensivists’ well-being.ResultsThirty-three intensivists from seven tertiary and six community hospitals participated. Intensivists reported experiencing substantial moral distress, particularly because of restricted visitor policies and their perceived negative impacts on patients, families, and staff. Intensivists also frequently reported burnout symptoms as a result of their experiences with patient death, exhaustion over the pandemic’s duration, and perceived lack of support from colleagues and hospitals. We identified several potentially modifiable factors perceived to improve morale, including the proactive provision of mental health resources, establishment of formal backup schedules for physicians, and clear actions demonstrating that clinicians are valued by their institutions.InterpretationRestrictive visitation policies contributed to moral distress as reported by intensivists, highlighting the need to reconsider the risks and benefits of these policies. We also identified several interventions as perceived by intensivists that may help to mitigate moral distress and to improve burnout as part of efforts to preserve the critical care workforce.

Formal Verification of Real-Time Autonomous Robots: An Interdisciplinary Approach.

Due to the severe consequences of their possible failure, robotic systems must be rigorously verified as to guarantee that their behavior is correct and safe. Such verification, carried out on a model, needs to cover various behavioral properties (e.g., safety and liveness), but also, given the timing constraints of robotic missions, real-time properties (e.g., schedulability and bounded response). In addition, in order to obtain valid and useful verification results, the model must faithfully represent the underlying robotic system and should therefore take into account all possible behaviors of the robotic software under the actual hardware and OS constraints (e.g., the scheduling policy and the number of cores). These requirements put the rigorous verification of robotic systems at the intersection of at least three communities: the robotic community, the formal methods community, and the real-time systems community. Verifying robotic systems is thus a complex, interdisciplinary task that involves a number of disciplines/techniques (e.g., model checking, schedulability analysis, component-based design) and faces a number of challenges (e.g., formalization, automation, scalability). For instance, the use of formal verification (formal methods community) is hindered by the state-space explosion problem, whereas schedulability analysis (real-time systems) is not suitable for behavioral properties. Moreover, current real-time implementations of robotic software are limited in terms of predictability and efficiency, leading to, e.g., unnecessary latencies. This is flagrant, in particular, at the level of locking protocols in robotic software. Such situation may benefit from major theoretical and practical findings of the real-time systems community. In this paper, we propose an interdisciplinary approach that, by joining forces of the different communities, provides a scalable and unified means to efficiently implement and rigorously verify real-time robots. First, we propose a scalable two-step verification solution that combines formal methods and schedulability analysis to verify both behavioral and real-time properties. Second, we devise a new multi-resource locking mechanism that is efficient, predictable, and suitable for real-time robots and show how it improves the latter’s real-time behavior. In both cases, we show, using a real drone example, how our approach compares favorably to that in the literature. This paper is a major extension of the RTCSA 2020 publication “A Two-Step Hybrid Approach for Verifying Real-Time Robotic Systems.”

Customer Service and Its Impact on Client’s Attraction and Retention in Tamale Technical University Hospital

The study examined the concept of customer service and its impact on clients’ attendance to Tamale Technical University Hospital. A sample of 100 clients was drawn using a simple random procedure. A cross sectional and purposive study techniques were applied. Formal interview and questionnaire schedules were the research instruments used for data collection. The study revealed that, the use of technology, availability of drugs, quality customer services and good communication are strong determinants to attraction and retention of customers in a hospital. The study also revealed that poor customer service has high effect on male attendance to hospital than female. Reducing clients waiting times and good courtesy to clients emerged as strong factors that can retain customers in a facility. Policy initiatives and recommendations to address poor customer services have been made.

Formal scheduling method for zero-defect manufacturing

A defect prevention is a part of manufacturing company practice. Paper proposes a formal approach for solving scheduling problems with unexpected events as extension of general frameworks for Zero-Defect Manufacturing (ZDM) strategy. ZDM aims to improve the process efficiency and the product quality while eliminating defects and minimizing process errors. However, most of ZDM applications focus on using the technological achievements of Industry 4.0 to detect and predict defects, forgetting to optimize the schedule on the production line. We propose formal method to create predictive-reactive schedule for problems with defect detection and repair. Our proposal is based on the formal Algebraic-Logical Meta-Model (ALMM). In particular, it uses the model switching method and combines defect detection, heuristics construction and decision support containing predictions of disturbances in the production process and enabling their prevention. Production defects are detected and repaired, and consequently, production delivers components without defects, and in the shortest possible time. Moreover, the collection and analysis of data related to the occurrence of disturbances in the production process helps the management board in making decisions based on analysis gathered and stored data. Thus, the proposed method includes strategies such as detection, repair, prediction and prevention for defect-free production. We illustrate the proposed method on the example of a flow-shop system with different types of product defect problem.

Federated Scheduling of Sporadic DAGs on Unrelated Multiprocessors

This paper presents a federated scheduling algorithm for implicit-deadline sporadic DAGs that execute on an unrelated heterogeneous multiprocessor platform. We consider a global work-conserving scheduler to execute a single DAG exclusively on a subset of the unrelated processors. Formal schedulability analysis to find the makespan of a DAG on its dedicated subset of the processors is proposed. The problem of determining each subset of dedicated unrelated processors for each DAG such that the DAG meets its deadline (i.e., designing the federated scheduling algorithm) is tackled by proposing a novel processors-to-task assignment heuristic using a new concept called processor value . Empirical evaluation is presented to show the effectiveness of our approach.

Examining STEM Teaching at the Intersection of Informal and Formal Spaces: Exploring Science Pre-service Elementary Teacher Preparation

ABSTRACT There is a growing emphasis on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education focused learning spaces vis-à-vis science education in the US public schools. These STEM learning spaces mostly take place in informal learning spaces such as STEM makerspace, coding academies, and STEM camps. With this emphasis, teachers teaching science in elementary grades may find themselves being asked to teach in STEM focused learning spaces that lay outside of their areas of expertise in science teaching to teach STEM concepts and skills (e.g., computational thinking, 3-D Modeling, TinkerCAD). This problem is further compounded by the fact that many informal spaces (e.g., STEM makerspaces) are now being integrated into formal school structures and schedules. This paper shares findings by examining the preparation of elementary pre-service teachers for teaching in one informal space—a STEM makerspace. We used an exploratory qualitative design method and share results that indicate including preparation in informal STEM teaching may be beneficial in one elementary teacher preparation program.

Bridging the gap between formal verification and schedulability analysis: The case of robotics

The challenges of deploying robots and autonomous vehicles call for further efforts to bridge the gap between the robotics, the real-time systems and the formal methods communities. Indeed, with robots being more and more involved in costly missions and contact with humans, a rigorous formal verification of their behavior in the presence of various real-time constraints is crucial. In order to increase our trust in its results, such verification should be carried out on models that are the closest possible to reality, and thus take into account hardware and OS specificities such as the number of cores provided by the robotic platform and the scheduling policy. In this paper, we propose a novel binary-search-inspired technique that allows to extend timed automata models of robotic specifications with dynamic-priority schedulers. Given a number of cores, the extended models can then be checked against various real-time and behav-ioral properties, including schedulability, within the same model checking framework. Our technique is implemented in an automatic translation from a robotic framework to UPPAAL, and evaluated on a real robotic case study, where it shows a significant gain in scalability as opposed to the counting technique used in the literature.

Phased-Array Radar Task Scheduling Method for Hypersonic-Glide Vehicles

The radar task scheduling problem of phased-array radar (PAR) in detecting hypersonic-glide vehicle (HGV) targets has been studied. Based on the hypersonic-glide vehicle motion-model and detection model, a two-stage scheduling strategy was designed. Task scheduling is divided into two stages: prescheduling and formal scheduling. In the prescheduling stage, low-priority tasks beyond the radar resource capacity are sent into delay queues or delete queues in advance. In the formal scheduling stage, the quantization model of scheduling principles and the objective function of task scheduling are designed, and task requests are scheduled in parallel by using the group intelligence algorithm. A particle swarm-annealing algorithm was designed due to its ease of use and global search ability. The simulation results show that the proposed task scheduling method is superior to the traditional scheduling method in terms of the scheduling success rate, time utilization rate, realization value rate, task miss rate and discovery target number.

Recognizing Musical Entities in User-generated Content

Recognizing Musical Entities is important for Music Information Retrieval (MIR) since it canimprove the performance of several tasks such as music recommendation, genre classification or artist similarity. However, most entity recognition systems in the music domain have concentrated on formal texts (e.g. artists’ biographies, encyclopedic articles, etc.), ignoring rich and noisy user-generated content. In this work, we present a novel method to recognize musicalentities in Twitter content generated by users following a classical music radio channel. Our approach takes advantage of both formal radio schedule and users’ tweets to improve entity recognition. We instantiate several machine learning algorithms to perform entity recognition combining task-specific and corpus-based features. We also show how to improve recognition results by jointly considering formal and user-generated content.

Receding horizon scheduling of processes with shared resources

The paper deals with the integration of shared resources in the formulation of process industry scheduling problems, with reference to the optimal operation of those processes that are composed by continuous and batch units tightly integrated by means of mass or energy flows. It uses as a reference a benchmark developed in the EU project HYCON2: a simplified crystallization section of a sugar factory. The aim is to present a novel formulation that allows the coordination of the continuous and discrete processes with shared resources generating feasible schedules that can be easily integrated in a wider optimization scheme. The approach uses formal scheduling methods, mixing three different time frames: one in continuous time for scheduling, another to describe the time evolution of the shared resources and a discrete one for synchronization of the shared resources and the integration with the continuous dynamics.

Conservation mycology in Australia and the potential role of citizen science

Fungi are undoubtedly important for ecosystem functioning; however, they have been omitted or given scant attention in most biodiversity policy documents, management plans, and formal conservation schedules throughout the world. This oversight may be due to a general lack of awareness in the scientific community and compounded by a scarcity of mycology-associated curricula at the tertiary level and a lack of mycologists in research institutions. Although molecular techniques advance the systematic cataloging of fungi and facilitate insights into fungal communities, the scarcity of professional mycologists in the environmental sciences hampers conservation efforts. Conversely, citizen science initiatives are making significant contributions to the mycology discipline by increasing awareness and extending the scope of fungal surveys. Future research by professional and amateur mycologists into the distribution of fungi and their function in ecosystems will help identify wider and more effective conservation goals.

Robotic and Advanced Laparoscopic Surgical Training in European Gynecological Oncology Trainees.

Advanced minimal access surgical training is an important component of training in gynecological oncology (GO). Europe-wide data on this topic are lacking. We present data on availability and trainee experience of advanced laparoscopic surgical (ALS) and robotic surgical (RS) training in GO across Europe. A prospective web-based anonymized survey of European GO trainees was sent to the European Network of Young Gynaecological Oncologists members/trainees. It included sociodemographic information and specific questions pertaining to training experience or satisfaction in laparoscopic and robotic surgery. χ test was used for evaluating categorical variables and Mann-Whitney/Kruskal-Wallis (nonparametric) tests for continuous variables between 2 and more independent groups. A total of 113 GO trainees from 29 countries responded. The mean (standard deviation) age was 35.2 (6.1) years, 59.3% were men, 40.7% were women, and 46% were in accredited training posts. The ALS and RS training was offered in only 43% and 23% of institutes respectively, and 54% and 23% of trainees had undergone some form of formal or informal training in ALS and RS respectively. A total of 62.4% felt that RS should be a formal component of GO training programs. A total of 61% and 35% planned to go outside their institute for ALS or RS training respectively. Trainees rating (1-5 scale) of their open surgery and ALS or RS skills (3.3/2.6/1.9) and training experience (3.5/2.8/2.1), respectively, were higher for open surgery than ALS or RS (P < 0.0005). Accredited posts were more likely than nonaccredited posts to offer ALS training (60%/31%, P = 0.002), formal training schedules (27.9%/4.4%, P = 0.003), and use of logbooks (46%/23%, P = 0.035). Training and experience in ALS and RS are poorly rated by GO trainees across Europe, and only few centers offer this. There is an urgent need to expand and harmonize training opportunities for ALS and RS. Most trainees want RS included as a formal component of their training.

Sustainability of Climate Resilient Soil and Water Conservation Strategies Nexus the Practices in Tragedy at the Upper Blue Nile Basin of Northwestern Ethiopia: Economic Welfare Implication to the Farming Communities

The existing unplanned and intensive agricultural practices are sustained at the expense of our endangered natural resources and future generations advantages seem highly compromised. The study was carried out in Northwestern Ethiopia at the Northwestern basin of the Blue Nile, the lower belt of Mount Choke where intensive but traditional farming system is predominant. The study evaluated climate smart soil and water conservation practices, compared the effectiveness of climate resilience strategies across variable farming systems and attributed reasons why sustaining soil and water conservation structures is a tragedy for the farming communities. Formal interview schedule, biophysical data, key informants and focus group discussions were used to gather primary data. The collected data was analyzed employing the Tobit Econometric Model using STATA. The result indicated that the variables like size of land holding (5%), slope (1%), presence of rodents on SWC structures (5%), frequency of extension contact (1%) and training opportunity significantly influenced the longevity of climate smart SWC structures. Farmers in all observed watersheds were found to involve climate smart SWC strategies, usually by mass campaign. However, sustainability of the already made structures is unsecured and get destroyed in less than a year (a tragedy in the area), except in locations with interventions of NGO-supported projects where zero grazing is adopted. In terms of the existing advantages, biological conservation measures (plantation on ridges) were found to be the most effective and sustainable) followed by level Fanyajuu (especially in area closures). On the other hand, soil bund terraces were found to be the least sustainable. Better conservation and maintained structures were observed in highland watersheds than lowlands. Total avoidance of free grazing, public awareness regarding ecological sustainability and setting social bylaws can lead climate resilience and ecological conservation. In addition, creation of public awareness on ecological sustainability can prolong longevity of climate smart SWC structures which can in turn help farmers improve economic welfare.