Requirements development and analysis for automotive electronics products have been found to be tremendously challenging to both OEMs and suppliers. Besides ambiguity, incompleteness, conflicts and other pitfalls commonly seen in requirement specifications, in some cases, a requirements document for a new electronics product may even not exist and may need to be developed from scratch. Analysis reveals that generic model-based approaches and toolsets presently available lack support for requirements development while facilitating all other development activities across the entire product development cycle.
In this work, we describe a model-based development methodology centering on requirements development, engineering, and management while supporting other development activities including requirements analysis and clarification, rapid prototyping, simulation, verification and validation, automatic code generation, and SIL/HIL testing. The methodology leverages the MATLAB® toolset features of visual conceptualization, rapid prototyping, simulation and ease of accessing model property data with m-scripts, not only to improve the traditional requirements development activities for understanding customer’s needs, abstraction and definition from concepts, requirements document elaboration, but also to make it possible to maintain a set of executable models that can be readily simulated and verified throughout the entire development process. We demonstrate that the methodology shall be particularly suitable to developing requirements from scratch and/or evolving a high-level requirements document to detail-level requirements specifications.
