Software Special Interest Group  

ASQ Section 509
Washington, DC and Maryland Metro
 
Presents
"Evaluating hazards in critical software-dependent systems"
 
By
Dr. Sushil Birla    
Senior Advisor, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission

Tuesday, December 15, 2015
at the 
Normandie Farm Restaurant
in 
Potomac, Maryland

 

Registration & Networking:  6:00 p.m.
Dinner: 7:00 p.m     Menu Options
General Announcements and Introductions:  7:45 p.m.
Introductions and Opportunities to connect if you are looking for a job, have an open position, etc.
Program:  8:00 p.m.
Adjourn 9:15 p.m.
 

The cost is a $25 charge for members of either ASQ or IEEE to cover dinner. The charge for non-members is $35.

Registration: Please register    here or by contacting Heather Reis about ASQ509 General Meeting questions at ().  

Speaker Biography: Dr. Sushil Birla

Dr. Sushil Birla (PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor - Computer Engineering) is a Senior Technical Advisor at the U. S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He leads nuclear regulatory research for digital safety systems. Formerly, Dr. Birla was a Technical Fellow with General Motors Research and Development, Electrical and Controls Integration Lab, where he earned the coveted Kettering Award for innovative auto-generation of electrical industrial control circuit design. His experience spans several application domains, including engineering & evaluation of safety-critical software-intensive systems, specification and evaluation of engineering automation; and R&D of industrial automation. He has served industrial and vehicular automation communities in many roles, for example: chairman of the former Sector Board 3, International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC); expert member and contributor to groups developing ISO 26262 and IEC 61499 standards; leader of the �US Air Force�-sponsored task force to develop requirements for a new generation of open-architecture discrete manufacturing automation control systems; member of the review panel for the former Manufacturing Engineering Lab in the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST); member of the �US Air Force�-sponsored "Machine Tool Task Force" and award-winning contributor to its 1980 study, "Technology of Machine Tools" including his landmark report, "Sensors for Adaptive Control and Machine Diagnostics" cited by over 150 articles and used for teaching in many universities. He has authored many articles and reviews for publications of the ACM and IEEE.  

Presentation Overview: 

Many critical software-dependent systems failed to meet their expectations, i.e., perform their critical functions as intended, increasingly due to some unintended interactions or unwanted behavior. Such failures have been attributed to deficiencies in the specified requirements, which, in turn, are due to immature practices in engineering for �negative� requirements such as avoidance of unwanted behaviors and in systematically deriving commensurate constraints. By treating conditions that degrade a critical function as hazards, the principles and concepts of hazard analysis are applied to identify such hazards and contributors to these hazards. Then, constraints are identified to prevent or avoid or eliminate the hazards and contributors to the hazards. Hazard analysis techniques, such as failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) and fault tree analysis (FTA) previously applied to hardware-based systems, are not well-suited to identify hazard contributors rooted in engineering deficiencies in a system dependent on complex logic such as software. The presentation is based on existing knowledge gleaned from published scientific literature and reported in a research information letter, published by the U. S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The approach is also applicable to non-nuclear critical applications, for example, medical devices, flight controls, and unmanned vehicles.

IEEE / Software SIG December meeting flyer here.

Locations and Registration

The presenter will be at Normandie Farm Restaurant which is located at:
10710 Falls Road, Potomac, MD 20854
Tele: (301)-983-8838

 

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