Generating EAST-ADL Event Chains from Scenario-Based Requirements Specifications

Real-time software-intensive embedded systems complexity, as in the automotive domain, requires rigorous Requirements Engineering (RE) approaches. Scenario-based RE formalisms like Modal Sequence Diagrams (MSDs) enable an intuitive specication and the simulative validation of functional requirements. However, the dependencies between events occurring in different MSD scenarios are implicit so that it is difficult to find causes of requirements defects, if any. The automotive architecture description language EAST-ADL addresses this problem by relying on event chains, which make dependencies between events explicit. However, EAST-ADL event chains have a low abstraction level, and their relationship to functional requirements has seldom been investigated. Based on the EAST-ADL functional architecture, we propose to use its central notion of event to conciliate both approaches. We conceived an automatic transformation from the high abstraction level requirements specified in MSDs to the low abstraction level event chains.