Requirements engineering in rail transit production: An experience report

Abstract

Software is an increasing part of train control systems, calling for the integration of sound software design techniques into consolidated industrial systems' engineering processes. Although requirements engineering is a traditional software engineering area, its relevance for critical embedded systems is underestimated. We present the experience of a public-private collaboration between University of Naples and Ansaldo Breda, a leading company in the field of rail transit systems. The experience is focused on requirements engineering as a driver to improve the development process in order to better support, in the long term, software quality and safety assurance activities, at the same time with a proper cost/quality trade-off (higher quality costs are compensated through reuse over a product line).