Methods to determine acceptable architecture for multiple platforms supporting multiple brands must represent both platform cost saving commonization as well as revenue enhancing brand distinctions. Functional architecting methods determine modularization based upon functional concerns. Brand identity is additionally determined by sensory aesthetics. We introduce three architecting rules to mai...

Perhaps it’s misguided to think of the Volkswagen scandal only in terms of its e ects on the engineering community. After all, many others have been a ected. Our environment has been polluted by diesel engines that claimed to be clean. Widows, orphans, and hedge-fund managers have lost their savings in the fall of Volkswagen stock. Executives will fall from grace as legal and political actions ...

This paper analyzes competition in a two-period differentiated-products duopoly in the presence of both switching costs and network effects. Consumers are assumed to have rational expectation about network sizes, and future prices. The equilibrium prices in both periods are lower than markets with just switching costs and they decrease with the magnitude of network effects. Hence, in any period...

1 Institute of Primate Research, National Museums of Kenya, Nairobi, Kenya, 2 KNUST School of Medical Sciences, Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, Kumasi, Ghana, 3 Kenya Medical Research Institute, Centre for Microbiology Research, Nairobi, Kenya, 4 Neglected Infectious Diseases, Infectious Diseases Unit, DG Research, European Commission, Brussels, Belgium, 5 Royal Tropical Institute (KIT), KIT Bi...

This paper presents an approach to architecting a family of products that share inter-changeable modules. Rather than a fixed product platform upon which derivative products are created through substitution of various add-on modules, the approach here permits the platform itself to be one of several possible sizes or types. Thus, the system is a collection of modules, each of which can be one o...

What is OSEK/VDX and where did it come from? A consortium of mostly European automotive companies created the OSEK standard in 1993. The consortiumʼs goal was to address the high recurring costs in developing and redeveloping Electronic Control Unit (ECU) software and to improve the compatibility of those applications. In 1994, OSEK merged with VDX, a similar initiative in the French automotive...

In this paper we present a technique to compute abstract models for formal and automatic system verification. The method reduces the state space by eliminating those parts of a system model which are not required to check a property. We introduce the method and illustrate it by a case study from an automotive application. We modelled a part of the comfort system of a Volkswagen car and verified...