Requirements engineering in rail transit production: An experience report

Software is an increasing part of train control systems, calling for the integration of sound software design techniques into consolidated industrial systems' engineering processes. Although requirements engineering is a traditional software engineering area, its relevance for critical embedded systems is underestimated. We present the experience of a public-private collaboration between University of Naples and Ansaldo Breda, a leading company in the field of rail transit systems. The experience is focused on requirements engineering as a driver to improve the development process in order to better support, in the long term, software quality and safety assurance activities, at the same time with a proper cost/quality trade-off (higher quality costs are compensated through reuse over a product line).