Abstract: Electrical faults pose a significant risk to people and property. A system is described that deploys instrument devices with sensors to detect faults within an alternating current (AC) electrical distribution system. These sensors may detect electrical, optical, thermal, acoustic, radio frequency, and other phenomena associated with a fault. Data from different sensors may also be used to distinguish fault and non-fault status. Users are notified if a fault status is detected. Mitigating actions may be automatically taken, such as de-energizing a branch circuit associated with the fault status. Information about non-fault status may also be used to mitigate nuisance circuit breaker interruptions. In some situations, a nuisance interruption of a breaker may be automatically reset if all instrument devices connected to the breaker reported non-fault status before the interruption.

Abstract: An adaptive garbage collection scheduler (42) in an interactive system (10) to schedule invocation of a mark and sweep garbage collection process. The adaptive garbage collection scheduler (42) determines a user impact index (I), corresponding to the effect of the garbage collection process on a user (22), and a collection urgency index (U), corresponding to how urgently the garbage collection process needs to be run. The garbage collection process is invoked by the adaptive garbage collection scheduler (42) when the collection urgency index (U) is greater than the user impact index (I).