Some questions have come up about the my several blogs using the Costa Concordia disaster as a theme. Is this what the blogs on MSDN are all about and how do they apply to the nature of technical blogging. Hopefully the rest of this blog will help you understand what my motivations are:
Naturally the Costa Concordia is of interest to me. I live in a small seaside town that has commercial fishermen, regularly schedule boats to Santa Catalina and a history of sailors, in fact it is named after a famous one. My family has a history of working in the merchant marines with one of my uncles being a captain of a liberty ship during WW2. My neighbors are crew people on yachts, whale cruises and do ocean engineering. The Costa Concordia is something we have discussed during our dog walks and over dinner as well as drinks.
Why? The Costa Concordia is an example of a lack of emergency management and what appears to be the success of software.
How is that? Software was successful on a ship that fell over on it’s side and many people died?
According to the news readers and other press it sounds like it was successful, every news item and news reader states that the Captain MAY have overrode the safety systems, the autopilots and so forth. No news item mentions that the software failed.
Think about the complexity of the software required to run the Costa Concordia, software for the purser, software for the stabilization, software for the communications, software for the engines, environment and so forth.
Reviewing the way software is designed and managed for any large system, like the Costa Concordia is a business and the art of software is about business.
As this is a complex discussion about software architecture, I am moving all entries about control system management to my
https://blogs.msdn.com/socal-sam, there the discussion has moved (for the time) beyond the emergency management to overall automatic system design.
Currently there are two blogs that I have written about the Costa Concordia and software architecture:
- A discussion about the modeling of a ship, in this case a submarine is reviewed, because of the similarities to any cruise ships, where the cruise ship has stabilizers, the submarine has fairweathers and stern planes)
- Also this is a lead article on how to deal with conversion of FORTRAN to modern languages.