Requirements Management for Automotive Systems Development

Electric's and electronics' content in the high performance luxury segment's vehicles is continuously increasing. Dynamically controlled safety features, passenger comfort, information and entertainment and operational convenience are the field of permanent innovation. To guarantee an appropriate level of quality for this permanently innovated features requires robust design techniques (analysis, modeling, simulation, rapid prototyping and verification) and reliably controlled integration processes for components with significantly different lifecycles including information management and change control.

For these purposes BMW chose to utilize object-oriented analysis (OOA) methods and to define its automotive-specific subset of the Unified Modeling Language UML [OMG99]. The resulting object networks of OOA are then specified within an object-based specification (generation of executable models) process. Dedicated tools support a seamless development process.

Effective information management and change control are based on sound management of the projects' requirements. Thus, the information model of the developed products has to be embedded in the requirements model.