The effect of ownership structure, country governance, and financial development on the capital structure of unlisted eastern European firms

This paper investigates the determinants of capital structure for a sample of 20,713 unlisted firms from 11 eastern European countries over the period 1994-2004. We employ usual firm-specific financial variables as well as country-specific variables that describe the degrees of governance structure and financial development of each country. Using regression analysis, our results indicate that firm ownership concentration and country governance structure are insignificant explanatory variables to the degree of leverage of the firms in our sample. On the other hand, indicators of country financial development are robust determinants of capital structure. However, the marginal explanatory power of country-specific variables is small. We conclude that firm-specific characteristics are decisive in capital structure.

An architectural approach to autonomics and self-management of automotive embedded electronic systems

Embedded electronic systems in vehicles are of rapidly increasing commercial importance for the automotive industry. While current vehicular embedded systems are extremely limited and static, a more dynamic configurable system would greatly simplify the integration work and increase quality of vehicular systems. This brings in features like separation of concerns, customised software configuration for individual vehicles, seamless connectivity, and plug-and-play capability. Furthermore, such a system can also contribute to increased dependability and resource optimization due to its inherent ability to adjust itself dynamically to changes in software, hardware resources, and environment condition. This paper describes the architectural approach to achieving the goals of dynamically self-configuring automotive embedded electronic systems by the EU research project DySCAS. The architecture solution outlined in this paper captures the application and operational contexts, expected features, middleware services, functions and behaviours, as well as the basic mechanisms and technologies. The paper also covers the architecture conceptualization by presenting the rationale, concerning the architecture structuring, control principles, and deployment concept. In this paper, we also present the adopted architecture V&V strategy and discuss some open issues in regards to the industrial acceptance.

A framework to integrate design knowledge reuse and requirements management in engineering design

This paper presents a framework to integrate requirements management and design knowledge reuse. The research approach begins with a literature review in design reuse and requirements management to identify appropriate methods within each domain. A framework is proposed based on the identified requirements. The framework is then demonstrated using a case study example: vacuum pump design. Requirements are presented as a component of the integrated design knowledge framework. The proposed framework enables the application of requirements management as a dynamic process, including capture, analysis and recording of requirements. It takes account of the evolving requirements and the dynamic nature of the interaction between requirements and product structure through the various stages of product development.