Refinement of scientific procedures carried out on protected animals is an iterative process, which begins with a critical evaluation of practice. The process continues with objective assessment of the impact of the procedures, identification of areas for improvement, selection and implementation of an improvement strategy and evaluation of the results to determine whether there has been the desired effect, completing the refinement loop and resulting in the perpetuation of good practice. Refinements may be science-driven (those which facilitate getting high-quality results) or welfare-driven or may encompass both groups, but whatever the driver, refinements almost always result in benefits to both welfare and science. Refinements can be implemented in all aspects of animal use: improved methodology in invasive techniques, housing and husbandry, and even statistical analyses can all benefit animal welfare and scientific quality. If refinement is not actively sought, outdated and unnecessarily invasive techniques may not be replaced by better methods as they become available, and thus outdated information is passed down to the next generation, causing perpetuation of old-fashioned methods. This leads to a spiral of ignorance, leading ultimately to poor practice, poor animal welfare and poor-quality scientific data. Refinement is a legal and ethical requirement, yet refinements may not always be implemented. There are numerous obstacles to the implementation of refinement, which may be real or perceived. Either way, in order to take refinement forward, it is important to coordinate the approach to refinement, validate the science behind refinement, ensure there is adequate education and training in new techniques, improve liaison between users and make sure there is feedback on suitability of refinements for use. Overall, refinement requires a coordinated ongoing process of critical appraisal of practice and active scrutiny of resources for likely improvements. In the busy world of biomedical research, this process needs help. In order to develop these themes further, a workshop was held at the LASA Winter Meeting 2006, UK, to assist in identifying potential obstacles to refinement, and then to explore and develop strategies for overcoming these obstacles in key areas. A range of strategies appropriate to different circumstances was identified, which should facilitate the implementation of refinements.
Due to organizational and technological barriers, actors involved in the management of natural or man-made risks cannot cooperate efficiently. In an attempt to solve some of these problems, the European Commission has made "Improving risk management" one of its strategic objectives of the IST programme. The integrated project Orchestra is one of the projects that recently started in this area. The main goal of Orchestra is to design and implement an open service oriented software architecture that will improve the interoperability among actors involved in multi-risk management. In this paper we will describe the goals of Orchestra and explain some of the key characteristics of the project. These are: Orchestra: Developing a Unified Open Architecture for Risk Management Applications 3 Orchestra: Developing a Unified Open Architecture for Risk Management Applications 5
In recent years we have conducted about 25 assessments using IEC 61508 or IEC 61511, working mainly to Safety Integrity Level (SIL) 2, but on some occasions to SIL 3. In this paper we present some of the lessons we have learned and offer advice to those seeking certification for components, systems or generic process capability. We cover the three main parts of the IEC 61508 standard: Functional Safety (FS) Management; Hardware; Software. More recently, our work has included software products whose assessment has entailed building complex arguments for their compliance. This has led us to use argument structuring techniques that we comment on at the end of this paper.
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