Editorial - Software language engineering

Software languages play an important role in software development. Software languages are the artificial languages that are used to describe software systems at various abstraction levels. They are applied to describe requirements and designs for software, definitions of software architectures, and implementations of software systems. A huge variety of different technological spaces exist to describe languages: programming languages, software modeling languages, data modeling languages, domain-specific languages, ontology language, and others.     

Performance modeling in critical engineering systems using RAM analysis

Reliability, availability and maintainability (RAM) analysis of system is helpful in carrying out design modifications, if any, required to achieve minimum failures or to increase mean time between failures (MTBF) and thus to plan maintainability requirements, optimize reliability and maximize equipment availability. To this effect, the paper presents the application of RAM analysis in a process industry. Markovian approach is used to model the system behavior. For carrying out analysis, transition diagrams for various subsystems are drawn and differential equations associated with them are formulated. After obtaining the steady state solution the corresponding values of reliability and maintainability are estimated at different mission times. The computed results are presented to plant personnel for their active consideration. The results proved helpful to them for analyzing the system behavior and thereby to improve the system performance considerably by adopting and practicing suitable maintenance policies/strategies.