Requirements Engineering for Automotive Embedded Systems

Abstract

Requirements engineering is both a phase of software development lifecycle and a subdomain of software engineering. In general, “requirements" is defined as the description of the functionality of software under design and its properties (functional and nonfunctional requirements). Requirements are often perceived as textual documentation. However, in automotive software engineering, requirements can have multiple forms—starting from the short textual descriptions of functionality to fully executable model-based specifications. In this chapter, we overview the notion of a requirement in general, and describe the types of requirements used when designing automotive software systems. We use the V-model, prescribed by the ISO 26262 safety standard, which describes the way in which software is designed in the automotive domain. We consider the different types of requirements used in these phases.