Thesis advisor: Fabio Schiantarelli / In the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2007-2009, Europe has been grappling with both a debt and a banking crisis, which caused a prolonged recession and on-going stagnation in some countries of the Eurozone. The distinctive feature of the European crisis, compared to the global recession that originated in the United States, is that it emerged as sovereign debt crisis and later evolved into a banking crisis, finally affecting the real economy. The banking and sovereign crises are heavily intertwined because of the interplay between banks and sovereigns in Europe. In fact, the so-called bank-sovereign nexus works both ways: not only banks hold large amounts of sovereign debt, especially from the domestic government, but also European governments retain a significant presence in the domestic banks' ownership. The adverse feedback loop is reinforced during a sovereign debt crisis, as banks' losses from sovereign debt further exacerbate the strain on the domestic sovereign in expectation of a future bail-out. The overall goal of this dissertation is to have a better understanding of the interplay between sovereign, banks and capital regulation. In my first and second chapter, I analyze the two-way feedback loop between banks and sovereigns in Europe. In particular, in the first chapter, I show that banks' sovereign debt exposures had a negative effect on credit supply during the crisis. In the second chapter I explore the role that politics may play in determining banks' exposure to sovereign debt. Finally, the third chapter investigates the effect of changing bank capital requirements for the firms that borrow from the affected banks. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

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<p>Transportation has expanded the scope of human mobility, increasing the distances we cover on a</p><p>regular basis. The large benefits of transportation have resulted in a huge recent increase in the</p><p>number of vehicles. This, however, implies an increased number of traffic accidents that cause</p><p>many fatalities and injuries every year. It also leads to problems like increased delay for</p><p>commuters, and negative effects on the environment. Not to mention, the money spent in the</p><p>wasted fuel, as well as the costs of fixing damaged equipment and property.</p><p>To help in mitigating these problems the vehicles and the road infrastructure should be equipped</p><p>with intelligent devices that allow them to communicate and collaborate with each other and</p><p>exchange safety information concerning accidents, road traffic conditions, and weather conditions</p><p>as well as non-safety information. Recently, this topic termed telematics has gathered</p><p>considerable interest constituting a lot of work and research all included under the title of</p><p>Intelligent Transportation System (ITS).</p><p>The thesis work defines general communication requirements of future telematics applications</p><p>and investigates various wireless carriers that are important to achieve communication inbetween</p><p>vehicles and between vehicles and nearby infrastructure. We analyse several future</p><p>applications related to the ITS field and describe their communication requirements. Based on the</p><p>communication requirements the applications are grouped into different profiles in order to</p><p>determine the most suitable carrier for each profile.</p><p>Disclaimer: This paper reflects only the authors’ views and the European Community (as cofounders</p><p>of the CVIS, SAFESPOT and PReVENT Sixth Framework Programme projects,</p><p>through the European Commission DG Information Society and Media) is not liable for any use</p><p>that may be made of the information contained within.</p>

One of the most essential parts of any software requirements analysis effort is the exploration of alternative ways by which stakeholder problems can be solved. Systematic modeling and analysis of requirements variability allows better decision making during the early requirements phase and substantiates design choices pertaining to the configurability aspect of the system-to-be. This thesis proposes the use of goal models for capturing and reasoning about requirements variability. The goal models we adopt consist of AND/OR decompositions of stakeholder goals and express alternative ways by which stakeholders may wish to achieve them. By capturing goal variability using such models, we propose a shift of focus from variability of the software design, to variability of the problem that the design is intended to solve. This way, we ensure that every important variation of the problem is identified and analyzed before variations of the solution are specified. The thesis exploits opportunities that arise from this new viewpoint. Firstly, a variability-intensive goal decomposition process is proposed. The process is based on associating each high-level goal to a set of variability concerns that must be addressed through decomposition. We introduce a universal categorization of such concerns and also show how domain-specific variability concerns can be identified by annotating domain corpora. Concern-driven decomposition offers a structured way of thinking about problem variability, while systematizing its identification process. Further, an expressive LTL-based preference language is introduced to support leverage of large spaces of goal alternatives. The language allows the expression of preferences over behavioral and qualitative properties of solutions and a reasoning tool allows the identification of alternatives that satisfy these preferences. This way, individual stakeholders can get the solution that exactly fits their needs in a particular situation, through simply specifying desired high-level characteristics of these solutions. Finally, a framework for connecting alternatives at the goal level to alternative configurations of common desktop applications is presented. The framework shows how a vast number of configurations of a software application can be evaluated and ranked with respect to a small number of quality goals that are more intuitive to and comprehensible by end users.

This thesis examines the issue of software evolution from a Requirements Engineering perspective. This perspective is founded on the premise that software evolution is best managed with reference to the requirements of a given software system. In particular, I follow the Requirements Problem approach to software development: the problem of developing software can be characterized as finding a specification that satisfies user requirements, subject to domain constraints. To enable this, I propose a shift from treating requirements as artifacts to treating requirements as design knowledge, embedded in knowledge bases. Most requirements today, when they exist in tangible form at all, are static objects. Such artifacts are quickly out of date and difficult to update. Instead, I propose that requirements be maintained in a knowledge base which supports knowledge-level operations for asserting new knowledge and updating existing knowledge. Consistency checks and entailment of new specifications is done automatically by answering simple queries. Maintaining a requirements knowledge base in parallel with running code means that changes precipitated by evolution are always addressed relative to the ultimate purpose of the system. This thesis begins with empirical studies which establish the nature of the requirements evolution problem. I use an extended case study of payment cards to motivate the following discussion. I begin at an abstract level, by introducing a requirements engineering knowledge base (REKB) using a functional specification. Since it is functional, the specifics of the implementation are left open. I then describe one implementation, using a reason-maintenance system, and show how this implementation can a) solve static requirements problems; b) help stakeholders bring requirements and implementation following a change in the requirements problem; c) propose paraconsistent reasoning to support inconsistency tolerance in the REKB. The end result of my work on the REKB is a tool and approach which can guide software developers and software maintainers in design and decision-making in the context of software evolution.

This thesis examines the issue of software evolution from a Requirements Engineering perspective. This perspective is founded on the premise that software evolution is best managed with reference to the requirements of a given software system. In particular, I follow the Requirements Problem approach to software development: the problem of developing software can be characterized as finding a specification that satisfies user requirements, subject to domain constraints. To enable this, I propose a shift from treating requirements as artifacts to treating requirements as design knowledge, embedded in knowledge bases. Most requirements today, when they exist in tangible form at all, are static objects. Such artifacts are quickly out of date and difficult to update. Instead, I propose that requirements be maintained in a knowledge base which supports knowledge-level operations for asserting new knowledge and updating existing knowledge. Consistency checks and entailment of new specifications is done automatically by answering simple queries. Maintaining a requirements knowledge base in parallel with running code means that changes precipitated by evolution are always addressed relative to the ultimate purpose of the system. This thesis begins with empirical studies which establish the nature of the requirements evolution problem. I use an extended case study of payment cards to motivate the following discussion. I begin at an abstract level, by introducing a requirements engineering knowledge base (REKB) using a functional specification. Since it is functional, the specifics of the implementation are left open. I then describe one implementation, using a reason-maintenance system, and show how this implementation can a) solve static requirements problems; b) help stakeholders bring requirements and implementation following a change in the requirements problem; c) propose paraconsistent reasoning to support inconsistency tolerance in the REKB. The end result of my work on the REKB is a tool and approach which can guide software developers and software maintainers in design and decision-making in the context of software evolution.

One of the most essential parts of any software requirements analysis effort is the exploration of alternative ways by which stakeholder problems can be solved. Systematic modeling and analysis of requirements variability allows better decision making during the early requirements phase and substantiates design choices pertaining to the configurability aspect of the system-to-be. This thesis proposes the use of goal models for capturing and reasoning about requirements variability. The goal models we adopt consist of AND/OR decompositions of stakeholder goals and express alternative ways by which stakeholders may wish to achieve them. By capturing goal variability using such models, we propose a shift of focus from variability of the software design, to variability of the problem that the design is intended to solve. This way, we ensure that every important variation of the problem is identified and analyzed before variations of the solution are specified. The thesis exploits opportunities that arise from this new viewpoint. Firstly, a variability-intensive goal decomposition process is proposed. The process is based on associating each high-level goal to a set of variability concerns that must be addressed through decomposition. We introduce a universal categorization of such concerns and also show how domain-specific variability concerns can be identified by annotating domain corpora. Concern-driven decomposition offers a structured way of thinking about problem variability, while systematizing its identification process. Further, an expressive LTL-based preference language is introduced to support leverage of large spaces of goal alternatives. The language allows the expression of preferences over behavioral and qualitative properties of solutions and a reasoning tool allows the identification of alternatives that satisfy these preferences. This way, individual stakeholders can get the solution that exactly fits their needs in a particular situation, through simply specifying desired high-level characteristics of these solutions. Finally, a framework for connecting alternatives at the goal level to alternative configurations of common desktop applications is presented. The framework shows how a vast number of configurations of a software application can be evaluated and ranked with respect to a small number of quality goals that are more intuitive to and comprehensible by end users.

Transportation has expanded the scope of human mobility, increasing the distances we cover on a regular basis. The large benefits of transportation have resulted in a huge recent increase in the number of vehicles. This, however, implies an increased number of traffic accidents that cause many fatalities and injuries every year. It also leads to problems like increased delay for commuters, and negative effects on the environment. Not to mention, the money spent in the wasted fuel, as well as the costs of fixing damaged equipment and property. To help in mitigating these problems the vehicles and the road infrastructure should be equipped with intelligent devices that allow them to communicate and collaborate with each other and exchange safety information concerning accidents, road traffic conditions, and weather conditions as well as non-safety information. Recently, this topic termed telematics has gathered considerable interest constituting a lot of work and research all included under the title of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). The thesis work defines general communication requirements of future telematics applications and investigates various wireless carriers that are important to achieve communication inbetween vehicles and between vehicles and nearby infrastructure. We analyse several future applications related to the ITS field and describe their communication requirements. Based on the communication requirements the applications are grouped into different profiles in order to determine the most suitable carrier for each profile. Disclaimer: This paper reflects only the authors’ views and the European Community (as cofounders of the CVIS, SAFESPOT and PReVENT Sixth Framework Programme projects, through the European Commission DG Information Society and Media) is not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained within.

General purpose rich-text editors, such as MS Word are often used to author software requirements specifications. These requirements specifications contain many different logical structures, such as use cases, business rules and functional requirements. Automated recognition and extraction of these logical structures is necessary to provide useful automated requirements management features, such as automated traceability, template conformance checking, guided editing and interoperability with sophisticated requirements management tools like Requisite Pro. The variability among instances of these logical structures and their attributes poses many challenges for their accurate recognition and extraction. The thesis provides a framework for the extraction of logical structures from software requirements documents. The framework models information about style, structure, and attributes of the logical structures and uses the defined meta-model to extract instances of logical structures. A meta-model also incorporates information about the variability present in the instances. The framework includes an extraction tool, ET, that reads the meta-model and extracts instances of modelled logical structures from the documents. The framework is evaluated on a collection of real-world software requirements documents. Using the framework, different logical structures can be extracted with high precision and recall, each close to 100%. The performance of the extraction tool is acceptable for fast extraction of logical structures from documents with extraction times ranging from a few milliseconds to a few seconds.

This study utilized two diets (25 and 35% crude protein) fed at 10 different rates to produce differences in shrimp specific growth rate which were regressed against daily digestible protein (DP) and digestible energy (DE) intake to estimate daily DP and DE requirements for sub-adult L. vannamei. Apparent DP and DE requirement for maximum growth decreased throughout the 7-week trial as shrimp size increased. Mean apparent daily DP requirement for 7.69 to 13.08-g L. vannamei fed the 25% protein diet was 6.31 g DP kg-1 BW d-1 while the 35% protein diet produced a mean apparent daily DP requirement of 8.00 g DP kg-1 BW d-1 for 8.11- to 13.79-g L. vannamei. Maintenance requirements were estimated by regressing DP feed allowances back to zero weight-gain and were 1.03 g DP kg-1 BW d-1 for shrimp fed the 25% protein diet and 1.87 g DP kg-1 BW d-1 for shrimp fed the 35% protein diet. Mean apparent daily DE requirement for shrimp fed the 25% protein diet was 402.62 kJ DE kg-1 BW d-1 while the 35% protein diet produced an apparent daily DE requirement of 334.72 kJ DE kg-1 BW d-1. Mean apparent daily DE maintenance requirements for shrimp fed the 25% protein diet was 66.23 kJ DE kg-1 BW d-1 while the requirement was 78.82 kJ DE kg-1 BW d-1 for shrimp fed the 35% protein diet. Daily DP and DE requirements were also determined by regressing whole-body protein or energy change against daily DP and DE intake and were similar to those values obtained by regressing change in body weight against daily DP and DE intake. Another component of this project involved evaluating 32 different feedstuffs for dry matter, protein and energy digestibility coefficients. Fish meal apparent crude protein digestibility coefficients as a group were higher than all other ingredient classifications except purified ingredients. Protein in 48% soybean meal and 90% isolated soybean protein were significantly more digestible than protein found in fish, animal and marine meals tested. This data will improve the quality and reduce the cost of commercial shrimp feeds.