A Model Driven Approach for Requirements Engineering of Industrial Automation Systems

Model driven requirements engineering (MDRE) is proposed to deal with the ever-increasing complexity of technical systems in the sense of providing requirement specifications as formal models that are correct, complete, consistent, unambiguous and easy to read and easy to maintain. A critical issue in this area is the lack of a universal and standardized modeling language which covers the whole requirements engineering process from requirement specification, allocation to verification. SysML is being proposed to meet these requirements. In this paper a model driven requirements engineering process for industrial applications in the field of automation systems is described in order to reveal shortcomings in recent modeling tools and modeling languages. Special focus is layed on the requirements definition and the automated verification of the design against the requirements using executable models. Based on the analysis a new profile of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) called Model Driven Requirements Engineering for Bosch Rexroth (MDRE4BR) is presented which aims to contribute to latest investigations in this field. An application example of a hydrostatic press system is given to illustrate the approach.