EAGER: SHF: A Community Case Environment for Empowering Transformative Requirements Engineering Research

University Of Notre Dame, Notre Dame IN

Investigators

Abstract

Requirements Engineering (RE) is the part of the field of Software Engineering that is concerned with "getting the right system" (requirements satisfaction) as well as "getting the system right" (correctness). For Cyberphysical Systems (CPS), system requirements play a big role in specifying and achieving functionality, runtime adaptation, design-time evolution of requirements, environmental assumptions, safety assurance cases, and the like. In order to bring RE to CPS, the research community is in need of shared infrastructure and case studies to pursue its research agenda. The proposed project is to create a realistic environment for supporting research in software evolution, safety assurance of product-lines, runtime-adaptation, requirements modeling, safety-assurance, and related research. The environment will be called "Dronology" an Unmanned Autonomous Vehicle (UAV) system for supporting search and rescue. Significant effort will be invested in engaging a community of RE researchers so that Dronology meets their current and future research needs. The work involves a combination of research, infrastructure development, and educational factors. It will deliver a fully-working system with an initial set of features to enable safe, coordinated flight of both virtual and physical UAVs in potentially populated areas. In addition, an extensive set of supporting artifacts will be developed that include requirements, domain descriptions, architecture documents, variability points, and safety assurance cases. Open research questions will be identified and analyzed, and then reflected in the composition of Dronology artifacts. The project will enable this community of users to also participate in contributing artifacts and code. The PI and several other members of the RE community plan to teach courses using Dronology and to cooperatively develop curriculum and share experiences. UAV/drones are an attractive, hands-on application area to engage students in RE.