Formal, Model- and Scenario-based Requirement Patterns

Distributed, software-intensive systems such as automotive electronic control units have to handle various situations employing message-based coordination. The growing complexity of such systems results in an increasing difficulty to achieve a high quality of the systems' requirements specifications. Scenario-based requirements engineering addresses the message-based coordination of such systems and enables, if underpinned with formal modeling languages, automatic analyses for ensuring the quality of requirements specifications. However, formal requirements modeling languages require high expertise of the requirements engineers and many manual iterations until specifications reach high quality. Patterns provide a constructive means for assembling high-quality solutions by applying reusable and established building blocks. Thus, they also gained momentum in requirements documentation. In order to support the requirements engineers in the systematic conception of formal, scenario-based requirements specification models, we hence introduce in this paper a requirement pattern catalog for a requirements modeling language. We illustrate and discuss the application of the requirement patterns with an example of requirements for an automotive electronic control unit.