Integrated and iterative systems engineering and software requirements engineering for technical systems

The development of software-intensive technical systems involves several engineering disciplines like mechanical, electrical, control, and particularly software engineering. Model-based Systems Engineering (MBSE) coordinates these disciplines throughout the development by means of discipline-spanning processes and a system model. Such a system model provides a common understanding of the system under development and serves as a starting point for the discipline-specific development. An integral part of MBSE is the requirements engineering on the system level. However, these requirements need to be refined for the discipline-specific development to start, e.g., into specific requirements for the embedded software. Since existing MBSE approaches lack support for this refinement step, we conceived in previous work a systematic transition from MBSE to model-based software requirements engineering. We automated the steps of the transition where possible, in order to avoid error-prone and time-consuming manual tasks. In this paper, we extend this approach with support for subsequent process iterations and provide an algorithm for the automated steps. We illustrate the approach and perform a case study with an example of an automotive embedded system.