Towards Context-Awareness in Model-Based Requirements Engineering

Abstract

Evolutionary system development and capability deployment are becoming common even in aerospace and defense. As systems evolve, the need to reach significant understanding of the existing architecture is critical for good requirements specification, due to the growing dependency of the requirements on assets in the current architecture. At present, requirement specifications typically do not clearly separate the baseline, or context, from the necessary delta, or prospect. The context informs the prospect and grounds it in the given architecture. The prospect specifies what the requirement owner needs, requires, or expects the system to be or do that is not already in the baseline. We propose a Context-Aware Model-Based Requirements Engineering (CAMBRE) method in which the context of a requirement is modularly composed with its prospect, such that the requirement text is specified in a context-aware manner. We distill those parts of a requirement that are designated for development from those that constitute the background. This approach is acute for complex, evolving, interdependent, or adaptive systems, in which system properties mostly extend or enhance the existing architecture. We implement CAMBRE with Object-Process Methodology (OPM), and demonstrate our approach on the evolutionary extension of a missile defense system with drone interception capabilities to support border protection efforts.