Three scientists all named Mohammed, M. Zulkermine, M. Raihan, M. Uddin presented "Towards Model-Based Automatic Testing of Attack Scenarios." I kept wondering why they didn't mention the Achilles system, which is the de-facto standard for such testing.

Several scientists from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology described "CRIOP" A Human Factors Verification and Validation Methodology that works in an Industrial Setting." This was a survey methodology to determine if an HMI works well or not.

I forgot, yesterday, to say anything about the "invited talk" that _I_ gave.

Here's the abstract:

While we concentrate at Control and ControlGlobal.com on process control in the batch, continuous and hybrid processing industries, I personally have wider interests in control... so it is fascinating to see how other control domains are practiced. Today at Safecomp, we are talking about other domains including railway control.

"A Domain-Specific Framework for Construction and Verification of Railway Control Systems" is the title of the "invited talk" for today. It is presented by Anne E. Haxthausen of the Technical University of Denmark.

John Eidar Simensen of Institute for Energy Technology offered a methodology using Baysian Belief Networks for estimating the complexity of critical instrumentation and control systems. This is an ongoing project which may provide the first real metrics for complexity after years of trying.

Safecomp 2009 ProgrammeHere are some notes from several of the talks at Safecomp:

In one talk, data was presented that indicates that decision support systems (whoops! all the rage among automation vendors at the moment) can seriously degrade the performance of operators:

Why are people's decisions sometimes worse with computer support?