Requirements Engineering for Control Systems Development in Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises

Abstract

Since nowadays more and more control systems are realised within software on electronic control units, a conceptual integration of control systems engineering and software engineering must be aimed at. Within this work, we build on a proposal to use the software requirements formalism i* to enable a combined investigation of control systems' and software requirements. While i*'s modelling means have turned out to be sufficiently expressive, two characteristics of control systems still need to be addressed: firstly, how to incorporate domain knowledge especially about the system to be controlled in the requirements development process and secondly, how to specifically support small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) that are the main driver for innovations in this domain. Due to their innovativeness and flexibility, the SMEs usually follow a project-oriented customer-specific development approach. To be nonetheless cost-effective, especially during the offer development phase, we develop a mechanism and a tool to compare a current requirements model with requirements models of control systems from earlier projects. Altogether this reduces time and increases reliability in regard to the identification of reusable software artefacts.