Required Changes in Requirements Engineering Approaches for Socio-Cyber-Physical Systems (original) (raw)
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2018
Over the last ten years, first research on self-adaptive systems (SAS), then research on cyber physical systems (CPS) and just in the last few years, research on collaborative systems has attracted the attention of the academic and industrial community. Self-adaptiveness, collaboration, and cyber physicality represent novel characteristics of softwareintensive systems insofar that such systems possess significantly different properties than traditional information systems or embedded systems. For example, their highly connected and context-aware nature gives rise systems constantly changing their runtime behavior, stressing the need for runtime adaptation and reorganization, which must be considered during the requirements phase. This implies new and unforeseen challenges for requirements engineering to systematically engineer self-adaptiveness, collaboration, and cyber physicality into these systems. Specifically, in order to develop adaptive, context-aware systems like SAS, CPS, o...
2020
Socio-cyber-physical systems (SCPSs) are cyber-physical systems (CPSs) with a sociotechnical system (STS) aspect. Several SCPSs need to adapt dynamically to changing situations in order to reach an optimal symbiosis with users in their contexts. Tailoring requirements engineering activities and modeling techniques is needed for developing SCPSs and supporting their runtime adaptability. Goal models are used to support early requirements engineering activities by capturing system and stakeholder objectives and their links, and by enabling what-if and trade-off analysis in a decision-making context. They are also increasingly used in system monitoring and self-adaptation contexts. Yet, linking system models to goals and automatically converting goal models to code for supporting analysis and adaptation activities remain important issues. This thesis combines a common way of modeling STSs (i.e., goal modeling with the Goal-oriented Requirement Language – GRL) with a conventional way of...
TOWARDS REQUIREMENTS REPRESENTATION USING AN EXTENSIVE ECA FORMALISM IN CYBER-PHYSICAL SYSTEMS
94Journal of Research in Engineering and Applied Sciences, 2019
Requirement engineering has a critical role to play in the machinery for self-adaptation in Cyber-physical systems. Unfortunately, properties in the definition of requirements vanish as requirements are implemented and refined as a design artifact Synchronization the running systems and requirement models is implicit in current literatures as being short of introspection between different trade-offs implied in different architectural configurations. That is, keeping synchronization between requirements and software architecture is particularly significant in CPS systems. This tendency calls for revisiting the current requirement engineering by emphasizing on the understandability of the requirements to enhance the monitoring and measurement of requirements across the lifecycle. Current proposals suffer from the implementation of specific algorithmic solutions or applying in specific components and services. All in all then, the development of CPSs is being challenged with requirement-awareness across the whole lifecycle. To address the predicament, an ECARE formalism with the property value is proposed as a lightweight engineering tool for requirement elicitation and representation as a first step towards the requirement-aware development of CPSs.
Continuous Requirements Engineering in Sociotechnical Systems: Challenges and Solutions
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Continuous requirements engineering in sociotechnical systems faces the challenges that originate from diverse and fast changes in systems contexts, project-based issues, and the multi-systems nature of sociotechnical systems. The interplay of these challenges and reported suggested treatments point to the necessity for flexible frameworks and new ways of knowledge management in systems development projects that concern sociotechnical systems.
Challenges for Requirements Engineering of Cyber-Physical Systems in Distributed Environments
Advances in Production Management Systems: Innovative Production Management Towards Sustainable Growth, 2015
Engineering of systems is highly influenced by rapid technological changes, such as the emergence of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). These are interconnected embedded systems enabled by human-machine interaction. Realisation of CPS require a collaboration between mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and computer science since different components are delivered and developed by different disciplines. Consequently, the Requirements Engineering (RE) process needs to consider multidisciplinary perspectives. The objective of this paper is to elaborate the specific challenges of RE for CPS in a distributed environment and to identify knowledge sources and targets in CPS engineering. It describes the relevant types of knowledge and defines appropriate exchange mechanisms and standards.
Evolving requirements in socio-technical systems: Concepts and practice
2011
Changes in requirements are inevitable in the context of socio-technical systems (STS) that involve human organizations with their rules, as well as individuals and software systems. In these complex systems need for changes may emerge once software components come into operation, due to undesirable behavior of the STS, or due to variations in organization rules, laws, resources and STS's components themselves. This leads to a problem of continuous analysis of evolving requirements in a traceable way. Our work is motivated by experience in a real project in the health-care domain, and in analysis practices based on participatory design methods (scenarios and personas) and on techniques for law-compliant requirements analysis. We revisit this experience and generalize it into a novel framework that provides concepts and practices to support an evolutionary and "participatory" process for requirements evolution in STS.
On Systems of Systems Engineering: a Requirements Engineering Perspective and Research Agenda
—The emergence of Systems of Systems (SoSs) and Systems of Systems Engineering (SoSE) is largely driven by global societal needs including energy-water-food nexus, population demographics, global climate, integrated transport, security and social activity. However, due to their scale, structural and functional complexity and emergent properties, these global spanning Cyber-Physical Systems of Systems are becoming increasingly complex and more difficult for current requirements engineering (RE) practices to handle. In this paper, we firstly introduce SoSE as an emerging discipline and key characteristics of SoSs. We then highlight the challenges that the RE discipline must respond to. We discuss some weaknesses of current RE techniques and approaches to cope with the complexity of SoSs. We then argue that there is a need for the global RE community to evolve current RE approaches and to develop new ways of thinking, new RE capabilities and possibly a new RE science as a key mechanism for addressing requirements engineering complexities posed by Systems of Systems. We then outline a requirements engineering perspective and research agenda that identifies 'top-10' research themes informed by a cluster of four
Inter-Domain Requirements and their Future Realisability: The ARAMiS Cyber-Physical Systems Scenario
2013 Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, 2013
Systems whose functionality and services span over multiple, interconnected application domains have become known as cyber-physical system (CPS) and currently receive much attention in research and practice. So far, CPS still come with a variety of development-process-related and technical challenges. These challenges include the interaction between the different domain-specific systems and possible conflicts between their requirements, as well as the choice of appropriate modelling concepts.
Effects of Environmental Dynamicity on Requirements Engineering for Complex Systems
2017
With customers demanding more and more holistic answers to their problems, solution providers respond with complex systems, integrating product, service and ICT elements into their offer. These solutions need to be aligned to a high number of requirements, coming not only from the individual customer but also from an environment of network partners, technology providers and other stakeholders. Especially for Product-Service Systems, where the solution provider takes responsibility in the operational phase, this environment is dynamic over the system life cycle. Stakeholders may enter or leave, as well as changing needs and technological capabilities. This makes the requirements towards the solution volatile, demanding a suitable Requirements Engineering approach. In this paper, it is discussed how environmental dynamicity can be monitored for its effect on requirements, with a special focus on organizational issues. Through a literature review and industrial case studies it is analy...
A Framework for Requirements Engineering Using System Dynamics
In many systems engineering activities the elicitation of requirements is regarded as a central activity for the efficient and effective functioning of the intended system. In recent years, the field of Requirements Engineering has received much attention and many research and practical approaches have been proposed. In this paper we present a Requirements Engineering framework that is motivated by the System Dynamics paradigm. The framework consists of four key activities: ontology modelling, goal modelling, process modelling and scenarios generation. It is our premise that the synergy between these four activities results in a robust way of working that provides requirements stakeholders with a systematic approach to articulating, defining, debating, and agreeing on the set of desirable functional and non-functional properties of the intended system. The approach is demonstrated with examples from a very large application and claims substantiated from experiences from this project.