Anaphylaxis is a life-threatening condition where delays in medical treatment can be fatal. Such situations would benefit from the drone delivery of an adrenaline auto-injector such as EpiPen®. This study evaluates the potential risk, reward, and impact of drone transportation on the stability of adrenaline during episodes of anaphylaxis. Further, this study examines pharmacists’ perceptions on drone delivery—pharmacists approved the use of drones to deliver EpiPen® during emergencies but had concerns with drone safety and supply chain security. Laboratory simulated onboard drone conditions reflected typical missions. In these experiments, in vitro model and pharmaceutical equivalent formulations were subjected independently to 30 min vibrations at 5, 8.43, and 13.33 Hz, and temperature storage at 4, 25, 40, and 65 °C for 0, 0.5, 3, and 24 h. The chiral composition (an indicator of chemical purity that relates to molecular structure) and concentration of these adrenaline formulations were determined using ultraviolet (UV) and circular dichroism spectroscopy (CD). Adrenaline intrinsic stability was also explored by edge-of-failure experimentation to signpost the uppermost limits for safe transportation. During drone flight with EpiPen®, the temperature and vibration g-force were 10.7 °C and 1.8 g, respectively. No adverse impact on adrenaline was observed during drone flight and laboratory-simulated conditions shown by conformation to the British Pharmacopeia standards (p > 0.05 for CD and UV). This study showed that drone delivery of EpiPen® is feasible. There are more than 15,000 community pharmacies and ≈9000 GP surgeries spanning the UK, which are likely to provide achievable ranges and distances for the direct drone delivery of EpiPen®. The authors recommend that when designing future missions, in addition to medicine stability testing that models the stresses imposed by drone flight, one must conduct a perceptions survey on the relevant group of medical professionals, because their insights, acceptance, and concerns are extremely valuable for the design and evaluation of the mission.

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A. Basden@ iti. salford. ac. uk A. J.Brown@iti.salford.ac. uk Abstract: explanation of the Istar knowledge representation software tool. Not only does it describe the features and facilities found in Istar, but it discusses why they are as they are.Istar is one of a new generation of knowledge representation tools, aimed at ill-structured domains of knowledge. While it can be used in traditional KBS projects, in which pieces of knowledge from a domain expert are assembled to form a working knowledge base, it is designed for situations in which there is a large element of creative design: knowledge rejnement and generation resulting from the knowledge representation process.The knowledge representation 'language' is purely graphical; the knowledge engineer 'draws' knowledge on an easel as a box and arrows diagram. Behind this diagram is the knowledge base itseg in the form of integrated inference nets, Bayesian nets and semantic nets. This paper discusses the reasons for these design choices and, briefly, some of the issues faced in development of Istar.

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Many critical issues still need to be tackled properly in order to manage concurrent engineering projects effectively. These issues include versioning, notification, and propagation, all of which need to be addressed throughout the construction project lifecycle. To this end, the COMMIT project strives to achieve an improved level of support for the versioning of project information at both the conceptual (schema evolution) and the instance levels. Versioning, notification, and propagation are addressed through the CIMM (a generic and context-independent information management model for supporting collaborative construction projects) and are described in this paper. The main concepts of the construction-oriented COMMIT Canonical Model (CCM), specialized from the CIMM, are also presented, followed by a description of the first prototype implementation of the CIMM tackling information versioning. This research is ongoing and supported by a well-established U.K. steering group.