Technical reports. Reports from the National Physical Laboratory UK (NPL)

Citation

(1999), "Technical reports. Reports from the National Physical Laboratory UK (NPL)", Kybernetes, Vol. 28 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.1999.06728cab.006

Technical reports. Reports from the National Physical Laboratory UK (NPL)

Technical reports

Reports from the National Physical Laboratory UK (NPL)

Two publications have been received from the UK's National Physical Laboratory:

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  Annual Review of the NPL;

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  Reports and Published Papers.

NPL's mission statement is:

As the UK's national standards laboratory NPL has a mission to satisfy the nation's current and future needs for physical measurement standards; to seek new ways in which the improved use of measurement can contribute to UK competitiveness; and to serve customers worldwide with an expanding range of high quality scientific services.

The review and report of published papers clearly shows the success of their technical programmes. The quality of their work is confirmed, the Managing Director Dr John Rae says, by the excellent technical work of his colleagues and their ingenuity and ability to innovate.This is acknowledged, he says, externally by the work, for example, of Patrick Gill and his team, which paves the way for a new generation of optical frequency standards (see Physical Review Letters, Vol. 78, 1997, pp. 1876-79).This work was recognised by the American Institute of Physics as one of the top 20 science stories of 1997.

Published work

Reseachers in a great variety of fields will know of the benefits they have reaped from work performed at the Laboratory.

Some of this work is listed in the titles of the papers published and referenced in the NPL Reports and Published Papers, January 1997-December 1997 referred to above, and indexed by author.

Ten different sections have been included, each giving the relevant NPL reports and the key papers published. Whilst their main aim is the development and application of highly accurate measurement techniques other areas of research and expertise have been developed including the design and characterisation of engineering materials and mathematical software. For example in the Information Systems Engineering area two of NPL reports were:

1. 1.

   "Testing Ada fixed point operations" (B.A. Wichmann, February 1997).

2. 2.

   "Formal specification in VDM-SL of the secure EDIFACT reference implementation" (G. Kelly, March 1997).

Amongst the published papers were:

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  "Quality in use: incorporating human factors into software engineering lifecycles" (N. Bevan, August, 1997).

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  "Usability issues in Web site design" (N. Bevan, 1997).

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  "Methods for measuring usability" (Bevan and Curson, 1997).

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  "Future directions for protocol testing, learning lessons from the past" (D. Rayner, 1997).

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  "Software in scientific instruments" (B.A., Wichman, 1997).

Many other papers provide essential information about a wide range of projects carried out by NPL researchers.

Review of information systems engineering

In the review of NPL's activities descriptions of 14 different section activities are published. Any one would be of much interest to readers ­ details from the section on Information Systems Engineering have been reproduced here:

The overall theme of NPL's contribution to the field of information systems engineering is "objective measurement, testing and validation". Primarily this finds application in providing software and mathematics support to all areas of metrology. In addition, our work finds specific application in the IT security field and in the telecommunications field (the latter is covered in the section relating to NPL's wide range of services to the telecommunications industry.

There are many different ways in which we support scientists and engineers involved in measurement activities, be they in NPL, other research and development organisations, or in industry. Our activities embrace mathematical research, software development, the application of appropriate mathematical and statistical techniques, testing numerical accuracy and stability, validating the logic of critical software, and promoting best practice.

A current topic for mathematical research is data fusion. This seeks to find appropriate mathematical techniques to help make sense of disparate measurement data coming from a large number of different sensors which may be operating under a variety of different conditions. For example, in monitoring air quality one might need to monitor temperature, pressure, humidity, concentrations of different gases, the presence of particulates and heavy metals, some of which will vary in systematic ways with time of day, season or weather conditions. The problem is how to identify the underlying trends in such data, when there is so much noise and uncertainty. The answer may lie in the techniques of data fusion.

Software development is conducted by our professional software engineers addressing situations in which it is important to achieve high standards of software quality. We aim to provide robust design, validated software, ease of use, flexibility for re-use as requirements change and cost-effective maintenance. Much of the software is concerned with instrument control, data acquisition, data analysis, and presentation of results. Mathematical and statistical techniques are applied to the modelling of physical systems and processes and to the estimation of uncertainties. A wide range of techniques is applied across all areas of metrology.

NPL are working with length metrologists to model the measurements taken by a co-ordinate measuring machine (CMM) when it is calibrated. They have developed world leading software testing techniques to provide systematic testing of the accuracy, stability and range of applicability of numerical software functions by using software reference data sets. These techniques are proven in practice and are now being applied to those functions present on common spreadsheet packages which are most commonly used for processing measurement data. A particular advantage of their techniques is the use of performance measures which take account of the degree of difficulty of the problem.

In addition to testing the numerical properties of software they provide services to validate the logic of software, particularly for use in a high integrity context, for example in safety-critical applications. The work includes the use of a variety of techniques including compiler validation, source code valuation tools, proof tools, and manual evaluation techniques based upon a deep knowledge of safety-critical software standards.

A new three-year programme of work has now been embarked upon as part of the UK's Department of Trade and Industry's (DTI) software support for metrology within the National Measurement System (NMS). It is recognised that the standard of software and mathematics used in different metrology disciplines varies widely.

The NPL reports says that:

In some areas, software has become the weak link, holding back further advances. The aim of the programme is therefore to identify best practice and to disseminate it to those areas that are most in need of improvement.

The full programme covers four technical themes:

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  modelling techniques;

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  validation and testing;

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  metrology software development techniques;

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  support for measurement and calibration processes.

Initially, we are focusing on projects concerning the modelling of measurement data, uncertainties and statistical modelling, testing software packages used in metrology (especially spreadsheet packages), model validation and validation of measurement systems (including embedded software in scientific instruments). In addition, a set of status reports is being produced to document the status of software and mathematics used in each of the NMS programme areas and in related work conducted elsewhere in the world. A Software Support for Metrology Club has been set up, with associated newsletter and Web site (http://www. npl.co.uk/sssm/). We are also organising an international conference entitled Advanced Mathematical and Computational Tools for Metrology which will be held in Oxford, and scheduled for spring 1999.

Our IT security work emphasises testing and evaluation. We have developed a novel approach to the analysis of the security weaknesses found by using a library of interrogation tools. This approach, which is called the vulnerabilities instantiation methodology, allows us to identify which vulnerabilities are a real security threat, based on the environment in which the system operates and the security policy of the organisation. We have developed a prototype implementation using this approach and expect to extend it in the future.

Biometric devices are increasingly being used for the verification of the end-user of systems where security is important, for example, using iris scans or fingerprints. In the EC collaborative BIOTEST project we have developed objective measures of the performance of biometric systems, testing recognition accuracy and also usability and vulnerabilities. Future work is expected to build upon this testing capability, performing evaluations of specific biometric devices.

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  National Physical Laboratory ­ Annual Review 1998, pp. 1-59.

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  National Physical Laboratory ­ Reports and Published Papers, January 1997-December 1997, pp. 1-39.

Copies of the NPL reports are available from the Laboratory on request. Contact: NPL Helpline for a list of what is available: National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, Middlesex, UK TW11 0LW. Tel: +44 (0) 181 943 6880; Fax: +44 (0) 181 943 6458; e-mail: enquiry@npl.co.uk