Applying software patterns to requirements engineering for avionics systems

Due to the long life cycles of aircraft their avionics systems usually have to be maintained and upgraded extensively. In order to support these operational requirements and possible product variants during the development, appropriate design techniques are needed. For the correct transfer of requirements to software architecture and software detailed design the syntactic and semantic gap between the requirements specification and the follow-up development steps needs to be minimized. Literature survey shows that there is a lack of such a requirements methodology. Therefore, this paper collects a catalogue of requirements patterns that meet the special demands for the development of avionics systems and are induced from established software design patterns. Applying these in a typical avionics system development project demonstrates their benefit and also highlights the way ahead.