An Overview
| Who we are |
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DIRC involves researchers with
an interest in dependable socio-technical systems from the Universities
of
Newcastle, York, Lancaster and Edinburgh and City University London.
DIRC is truly a
multi-disciplinary project, bringing together researchers with backgrounds
in computer science, maths, psychology, sociology and business.
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| What we are doing |
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DIRC is a long term, six year research project that started
in July 2000. The aims of DIRC
are to develop knowledge, methods and tools that contribute to
our understanding of socio-technical system dependability and
that support developers of dependable systems. DIRC has made
remarkable progress across a number of ares, and the DIRC inter-disciplinary
approach is being increasingly recognised as an important contribution
to dependability research.
Research achievements include:
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| Why we do it |
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Society is increasingly reliant
on complex computer-based systems ranging from control
systems in aircraft, trains and cars through business critical
systems such as e-banking systems to systems that are an integral
part of our critical national infrastructure. These systems have to
be dependable - failure can have serious consequences - loss of life,
loss of essential services or significant finacial losses.
Although much progress has been made in technical approaches to
dependability achievement, this is not enough - many failures arise through
the interactions of organisations, people and computer systems. The DIRC
philosophy is that we can only tackle these problems and make significant
steps forward in dependability improvement through an inter-disciplinary
approach.
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| Want to know more? |
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Further enquiries about the DIRC project should be sent to dirc-enquiries@ncl.ac.uk
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