Integrated systems engineering and software requirements engineering for technical systems

Abstract

The development of software-intensive technical systems (e.g., within the automotive industry) involves several engineering disciplines like mechanical, electrical, control, and software engineering. Model-based Systems Engineering (MBSE) coordinates these disciplines throughout the development by means of discipline-spanning processes and system models. Such a system model provides a common understanding of the system under development and serves as a starting point for the discipline-specific development. An integral part of MBSE is the requirements engineering on the system level. However, for the discipline-specific development to start, these requirements need to be refined, e.g., into specific requirements for the embedded software. Since existing MBSE approaches lack support for this refinement step, we conceived a systematic transition from MBSE to model-based software requirements engineering, which we present in this paper. We automated the steps of the transition where possible, in order to avoid error-prone and time-consuming manual tasks. We illustrate the approach with an example of an automotive embedded system.