Defining requirements at different levels of abstraction

Requirements engineering for complex software intensive systems has become a major challenge in many software development projects. Especially the automotive industry experiences the increasing complexity of software in vehicles, during the last years. An actual premium vehicle, for instance embodies up to hundred electronic control units (ECU) with easily a few hundred features, each. Beneath the definition of abstract features, an electronic control unit is described by different goals, scenarios, requirements, and constraints. To create a manageable and traceable requirements specification for complex systems that enables the change and reuse of requirements, many companies claim assistance for a seamless specification of requirements. To satisfy this claim necessary requirements-artefacts and abstraction levels have to be defined. Further the interrelations between different requirements-artefacts of one, and among different abstraction levels have to be analyzed and defined. Recent research in this area has shown the benefits of goals and scenarios in addition to traditional requirements. Moreover, several researchers and practitioners have already researched the interrelations between goals and scenarios. However these works do not focus on the interrelationships of goals, scenarios, and requirements on different abstraction levels. In a joint project with DaimlerChrysler and the Software Systems Engineering Group at the University of Duisburg-Essen, we introduced goals, scenarios, and requirements on different abstraction levels and applied it in the context of a development project at DaimlerChrysler.