RE4CPS: Requirements Engineering for Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) connect the cyber world with the physical world through a network of interrelated elements, such as sensors and actuators, robots, and other computing devices. There are increasing number of beneficial applications in dependable sectors such as aviation, transportation, aerospace, healthcare, etc.. The inherent characteristics of CPSs pose a number of challenges to requirements engineering. Unlike normal information systems, CPSs need to continuously detect and adapt to the environment changes. The interactive environment becomes the first-class citizen because the features and the changing patterns in environment are must-to-be considered. Moreover, in such systems, many non-functional requirements are environment related, like timing, safety, security, and privacy requirements. This tutorial will introduce an environment modelling based approach to engineering the requirements of CPSs. Extending the Problem Frames representations, this approach structures the model of the environmental elements and provides analysis methods for deriving and specifying requirements. We deliver this tutorial with a few supporting tools that assist the modelling and verification of the system specification, demonstrated with working examples in sufficient details. After the tutorial, participants will be able to work on the environment modelling requirements engineering for their own projects, with some hands-on experience and a good knowledge of some tool support.