By Jonas Helming, Maximilian Koegel, Bernd Bruegge, (Institut für Informatik, Technische Universität München) and Brian Berenbach (Siemens Corporate Research, Princeton, NJ)
Abstract: Building environmentally friendly software and hardware systems is about understanding and respecting the requirements that are imposed by climate change or regulation. This is especially true, as those systems often require inter-disciplinary collaboration between domain experts who might not have a software or systems engineering background. Existing requirements models lack in three dimensions supporting this objective: First, they do not integrate approaches to explicitly model environmental requirements and possible hazards. Second, they do not provide visualizations that are intuitively understandable by non-system engineers. Third, there is no integrated tool-support for requirements modeling in a globally distributed set-up.
We propose a unified requirements modeling language (URML) to address these problems. URML supports integrated requirements modeling as well as the cross-disciplinary visualization of environmental requirements, regulations and hazards. Furthermore we describe UNICASE, a tool for collaboration on these models allowing the visualization of traceability from climate critical requirements to their implementation in the system.
Software Research and Climate Change 
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April 20, 2010 at 12:35 am
Lin Liu
This position paper takes a requirements engineering perspective to the environmental systems. A unified requirements modelling language URML is proposed, which integrates goal , use cases , feature modelling, hazard and threat modelling, and other visual modelling techniques in RE to treat environmental friendliness needs and constraints. For people doing requirements engineering research, the presentation of this paper drills down to the discussion of how RE can help environmental problem.
April 22, 2010 at 12:19 pm
Ian Sommerville
I thought that this was stretching the work a bit to fit it to the workshop theme. The paper was about requirements engineering and the point was made that energy utilization could be a requirements constraint. Most IT systems that consume energy (e.g. servers) aren’t procured through a conventional RE process.
The work may be interesting in its own right but I thought that it was rather peripheral to the workshop
April 24, 2010 at 9:24 am
Davor
I don’t agree with Lin Liu’s comment. The URML is not proposed in this paper, but it is rather an already developed general requirements modeling language. I do agree with Ian that the paper is a stretch, and I think it would have been better if it was maybe presented as a possible case study evaluation of URML through application to the domain of “environmental systems”.
In particular:
– (Title) I do not think “unified requirement modeling” is necessarily URML. Most of the paper discussed language issues rather than general modeling issues. I see modeling challenges as something separate from language representation challenges. E.g., modeling challenges might involve difficulties of a priori interconnecting imposed mileage regulations to safety requirements on new cars required due to the change in material structure of a car from steel to plastic in order to reduce the weight of the car, as opposed to a particular difficulties in representing this information in a a particular requirements modeling language.
– (Title) While title is focused on “Environmental systems”, the paper is not. Maybe just because “environmental systems” is not defined? Are there “non-environmental systems”. Can we assume that there should be a requirement on each software system to reduce its own CPU usage in order to reduce power consumption in order to minimize (not necessarily direct) CO2 emissions? If yes, then each software system is an “environmental system”…
– (Abstract) The first sentence provides another better focus for this paper: unified requirements modeling of requirements imposed by climate change regulations. This would have been a RE language independent discussion of what these requirements are (and maybe a classification). I still have no clue what they are and I am not aware of any classification. Also, is climate change or just related regulations something that is imposing requirements?
– (Paper) IMO, the paper body is just saying that we can apply a general RE modeling language to modeling environmental systems. It would have been maybe more interesting if there was something pointed out that we cannot model and thus we have to work on a new language. I’m not sure in which direction this paper will evolve as URML is obviously already defined and used. Maybe you are expecting to discover something in environmental systems that will require significant modifications to URML?
– (Figure 1) I don’t like the statement that customer’s goal is sport car. I am not sure that a system is ever a goal, but rather (at least more often?) just a mean towards an end (a true goal – e.g., in this case to travel faster, appear rich, appear potent and agile, etc.). An equivalent would be claiming that a word processor software system is a customer’s goal in day-to-day business environment…
Overall, it’s not clear to me what direction you are aiming to proceed with this research: an evaluation/application of URML or study of environment system requirements or something completely different…
April 28, 2010 at 5:54 pm
Ideas for the workshop program « Software Research and Climate Change
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