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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 163 records · Page 9

Horocycle regulator: Exact cutoff-independence in AdS/CFT

While the entanglement entropy of a single subregion in quantum field theory is formally infinite and requires regularization, certain combinations of entropies are perfectly finite in the limit that the regulator is removed, the mutual information being a common example. For generic regulator schemes, such as a holographic calculation with a uniform radial cutoff, these quantities show nontrivial dependence on the regulator at finite values of the cutoff. We investigate a holographic regularization scheme defined in three-dimensional anti-de Sitter space constructed from , curves in two-dimensional hyperbolic space perpendicular to all geodesics approaching a single point on the boundary, that leads to finite information measures that are cutoff independent, even at finite values of the regulator. We describe a broad class of such information measures, and describe how the field theory dual to the horocycle regulator is inherently nonlocal. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

Agrawal, Sristy↗

Conduct of Operations and Nuclear Criticality Safety Standards

Since the beginning of the nuclear age in 1943, there have been 22 criticality accidents in process facilities worldwide in which fissionable materials were processed by hand for various purposes. Of these 22 process criticality accidents, 16 involved faulty or flawed conduct of operations. Most of these process accidents (17 of 22) occurred before 1970, mostly due to the implementation of formal conduct of operations—such as the use of operating procedures and training—and the use of consensus standards for nuclear criticality safety (NCS). Obviously, the nuclear facilities applied lessons learned from their accident history, and the rate of criticality accidents was significantly reduced as a result. Over the years, it has been emphasized in NCS training courses and other venues in the United States that the consensus standards, such as ASA N6.1-1964, were the key contributors to this reduction in accidents. The formality of operations required to implement and apply the standards at a facility is also a crucial prerequisite that must be sufficiently robust to ensure NCS. This prerequisite is crucial to success fully implement the NCS consensus and other safety standards at a site.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

302.2.03 Report on P43OL1139

This document describes the quality issues encountered in bare cable P43OL1139AA00A fabrication and the subsequent investigation performed at LBNL. The cable concerned was placed under L3 quarantine (braiding held, further QC required) in December 2020 upon fabrication due to mid-run facet size increase, and was elevated to L2 quarantine in February 2020 to require a more formal reporting and resolution. The approval (rejection) of this report by L2 on DocDB shall constitute acceptance (rejection) of the fabrication of the bare cable unit P43OL1139AA00A, upon which it may (may not) proceed to braiding and EVMS HO.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Interpretation of an urban scene using multi-channel radar imagery

Four channel, SLAR imagery was studied by a group of individuals having no previous experience with either SLAR imagery or the urban area under scrutiny. This tactic was used because it was desired to define the nature of training needed when introducing people to radar imagery of urban scenes. Responses resulting from interpretations based on standard photointerpretation methods were subjected to a Chi-square analysis to determine the level of significance of the interpretations. For the urban scene studied, and for the two wavelengths (X /3.0 cm/ and L /23.0 cm/ Band) and polarizations (HH and HV) used, several types of urban land use were easily and accurately identified. It is shown that little formal training is required for obtaining quite high interpretation accuracies from multi-channel radar images of some urban scenes.

Bryan, M. L.↗

Thermostructural tailoring of fiber composite structures

A significant area of interest in design of complex structures involves the study of multidisciplined problems. The coordination of several different intricate areas of study to obtain a particular design of a structure is a new and pressing area of research. In the past, each discipline would perform its task consecutively using the appropriate inputs from the other disciplines. This process usually required several time-consuming iterations to obtain a satisfactory design. The alternative pursued here is combining various participating disciplines and specified design requirements into a formal structural computer code. The main focus of this research is to develop a multidiscipline structural tailoring method for select composite structures and to demonstrate its application to specific areas. The development of an integrated computer program involves the coupling of three independent computer programs using an excutive module. This module will be the foundation for integrating a structural optimizer, a composites analyzer and a thermal analyzer. With the completion of the executive module, the first step was taken toward the evolution of multidiscipline software in the field of composite mechanics. Through the use of an array of cases involving a variety of objective functions/constraints and thermal-mechanical load conditions, it became evident that simple composite structures can be designed to a combined loads environment.

Acquaviva, Thomas H.↗

A verification logic representation of indeterministic signal states

The integration of modern CAD tools with formal verification environments require translation from hardware description language to verification logic. A signal representation including both unknown state and a degree of strength indeterminacy is essential for the correct modeling of many VLSI circuit designs. A higher-order logic theory of indeterministic logic signals is presented.

Gambles, J. W.↗

Configuration Management of an Optimization Application in a Research Environment

Multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) research aims to increase interdisciplinary communication and reduce design cycle time by combining system analyses (simulations) with design space search and decision making. The High Performance Computing and Communication Program's current High Speed Civil Transport application, HSCT4.0, at NASA Langley Research Center involves a highly complex analysis process with high-fidelity analyses that are more realistic than previous efforts at the Center. The multidisciplinary processes have been integrated to form a distributed application by using the Java language and Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) software techniques. HSCT4.0 is a research project in which both the application problem and the implementation strategy have evolved as the MDO and integration issues became better understood. Whereas earlier versions of the application and integrated system were developed with a simple, manual software configuration management (SCM) process, it was evident that this larger project required a more formal SCM procedure. This report briefly describes the HSCT4.0 analysis and its CORBA implementation and then discusses some SCM concepts and their application to this project. In anticipation that SCM will prove beneficial for other large research projects, the report concludes with some lessons learned in overcoming SCM implementation problems for HSCT4.0.

Townsend, James C.↗

Experiment Document for 01-E077 Microgravity Investigation of Crew Reactions in 0-G (MICRO-G)

The Experiment Document (ED) serves the following purposes: a) It provides a vehicle for Principal Investigators (PIS) to formally specify the requirements for performing their experiments. b) It provides a technical Statement of Work (SOW). c) It provides experiment investigators and hardware developers with a convenient source of information about Human Life Sciences (HLS) requirements for the development and/or integration of flight experiment projects. d) It is the primary source of experiment specifications for the HLS Research Program Office (RPO). Inputs from this document will be placed into a controlled database that will be used to generate other documents.

Newman, Dava J.↗

Minnowbrook I: 1993 Workshop on End-Stage Boundary Layer Transition

This volume contains materials presented at the Minnowbrook I-1993 Workshop on End-Stage Boundary Layer Transition, held at the Syracuse University Minnowbrook Conference Center, New York, from August 15 to 18, 1993. This volume was previously published as a Syracuse University report edited by John E. LaGraff. The workshop organizers were John E. LaGraff (Syracuse University), Terry V. Jones (Oxford University), and J. Paul Gostelow (University of Technology, Sydney). The workshop focused on physical understanding of the late stages of transition from laminar to turbulent flows, with the specific goal of contributing to improving engineering design of turbomachinery and wing airfoils. The workshop participants included academic researchers from the United States and abroad, and representatives from the gas-turbine industry and U.S. government laboratories. To improve interaction and discussions among the participants, no formal papers were required. The physical mechanisms discussed were related to natural and bypass transition, wake-induced transition, effects of freestream turbulence, turbulent spots, hairpin vortices, nonlinear instabilities and breakdown, instability wave interactions, intermittency, turbulence, numerical simulation and modeling of transition, heat transfer in boundary-layer transition, transition in separated flows, laminarization, transition in turbomachinery compressors and turbines, hypersonic boundary-layer transition, and other related topics. This volume contains abstracts and copies of the viewgraphs presented, organized according to the workshop sessions. The workshop summary and the plenary discussion transcript clearly outline future research needs.

LaGraff, John E.↗

Compositional Verification of a Communication Protocol for a Remotely Operated Vehicle

This paper presents the specification and verification in the Prototype Verification System (PVS) of a protocol intended to facilitate communication in an experimental remotely operated vehicle used by NASA researchers. The protocol is defined as a stack-layered com- position of simpler protocols. It can be seen as the vertical composition of protocol layers, where each layer performs input and output message processing, and the horizontal composition of different processes concurrently inhabiting the same layer, where each process satisfies a distinct requirement. It is formally proven that the protocol components satisfy certain delivery guarantees. Compositional techniques are used to prove these guarantees also hold in the composed system. Although the protocol itself is not novel, the methodology employed in its verification extends existing techniques by automating the tedious and usually cumbersome part of the proof, thereby making the iterative design process of protocols feasible.

Goodloe, Alwyn E.↗

Data Automata in Scala

The field of runtime verification has during the last decade seen a multitude of systems for monitoring event sequences (traces) emitted by a running system. The objective is to ensure correctness of a system by checking its execution traces against formal specifications representing requirements. A special challenge is data parameterized events, where monitors have to keep track of the combination of control states as well as data constraints, relating events and the data they carry across time points. This poses a challenge wrt. efficiency of monitors, as well as expressiveness of logics. Data automata is a form of automata where states are parameterized with data, supporting monitoring of data parameterized events. We describe the full details of a very simple API in the Scala programming language, an internal DSL (Domain-Specific Language), implementing data automata. The small implementation suggests a design pattern. Data automata allow transition conditions to refer to other states than the source state, and allow target states of transitions to be inlined, offering a temporal logic flavored notation. An embedding of a logic in a high-level language like Scala in addition allows monitors to be programmed using all of Scala's language constructs, offering the full flexibility of a programming language. The framework is demonstrated on an XML processing scenario previously addressed in related work.

runtime verification↗

Feature-Guided Analysis of Neural Networks

Applying standard software engineering practices to neural networks is challenging due to the lack of high-level abstractions describing a neural network’s behavior. To address this challenge, we propose to extract high-level task-specific features from the neural network internal representation, based on monitoring the neural network activations.The extracted feature representations can serve as a link to high-level requirements and can be leveraged to enable fundamental software engineering activities, such as automated testing, debugging, requirements analysis, and formal verification, leading to better engineering of neural networks. Using two case studies, we present initial empirical evidence demonstrating the feasibility of our ideas.

Features↗

Software Formal Inspections Guidebook

The Software Formal Inspections Guidebook is designed to support the inspection process of software developed by and for NASA. This document provides information on how to implement a recommended and proven method for conducting formal inspections of NASA software. This Guidebook is a companion document to NASA Standard 2202-93, Software Formal Inspections Standard, approved April 1993, which provides the rules, procedures, and specific requirements for conducting software formal inspections. Application of the Formal Inspections Standard is optional to NASA program or project management. In cases where program or project management decide to use the formal inspections method, this Guidebook provides additional information on how to establish and implement the process. The goal of the formal inspections process as documented in the above-mentioned Standard and this Guidebook is to provide a framework and model for an inspection process that will enable the detection and elimination of defects as early as possible in the software life cycle. An ancillary aspect of the formal inspection process incorporates the collection and analysis of inspection data to effect continual improvement in the inspection process and the quality of the software subjected to the process.

Source record↗

The Ten Lockheed Martin Cyber-Physical Challenges: Formalized, Analyzed, and Explained

Capturing and analyzing requirements of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) can be challenging, since CPS models typically involve time-varying and real-valued variables, physical system dynamics, or even adaptive behavior. MATLAB/Simulinkis a development and simulation framework that is widely used in industry to capture such systems. In this paper, we report on the application of NASA Ames tools to perform end-to-end analysis of the Ten Lockheed Martin Challenge Problems (LMCPS). LMCPS is a set of industrial Simulink model benchmarks and natural language requirements developed by domain experts. Our framework, which integrates the tools FRET and COCOSIM, is used to: 1) elicit, explain, and formalize the semantics of the given natural language requirements; 2) generate verification code and monitors that can be automatically attached to the Simulink models; 3) perform verification by using SMT-based model checkers. FRET and COCOSIM are open source, and can be used by other researchers and practitioners to replicate our case study. We provide a categorization of recurring patterns in the formalization of the requirements and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of our automated verification approach.

Anastasia Mavridou↗

Software Safety Risk in Legacy Safety-Critical Computer Systems

Safety-critical computer systems must be engineered to meet system and software safety requirements. For legacy safety-critical computer systems, software safety requirements may not have been formally specified during development. When process-oriented software safety requirements are levied on a legacy system after the fact, where software development artifacts don't exist or are incomplete, the question becomes 'how can this be done?' The risks associated with only meeting certain software safety requirements in a legacy safety-critical computer system must be addressed should such systems be selected as candidates for reuse. This paper proposes a method for ascertaining formally, a software safety risk assessment, that provides measurements for software safety for legacy systems which may or may not have a suite of software engineering documentation that is now normally required. It relies upon the NASA Software Safety Standard, risk assessment methods based upon the Taxonomy-Based Questionnaire, and the application of reverse engineering CASE tools to produce original design documents for legacy systems.

Hill, Janice↗

The MINERVA Software Development Process

This paper presents a software development process for safety-critical software components of cyber-physical systems. The process is called MINERVA, which stands for Mirrored Implementation Numerically Evaluated against Rigorously Verified Algorithms. The process relies on formal methods for rigorously validating code against its requirements. The software development process uses: (1) a formal specification language for describing the algorithms and their functional requirements, (2) an interactive theorem prover for formally verifying the correctness of the algorithms, (3) test cases that stress the code, and (4) numerical evaluation on these test cases of both the algorithm specifications and their implementations in code. The MINERVA process is illustrated in this paper with an application to geo-containment algorithms for unmanned aircraft systems. These algorithms ensure that the position of an aircraft never leaves a predetermined polygon region and provide recovery maneuvers when the region is inadvertently exited.

Narkawicz, Anthony↗