Integrated Automotive Requirements Engineering with a SysML-Based Domain-Specific Language

The rising overall complexity of modern cars as a special case of mechatronic systems leads to an increasing number of functions implemented by electric and electronic (E/E-) systems. Well-known design problems of complex modular systems arise out of this. To achieve high-quality standards along the whole product life cycle, modern systems and software engineering methods and techniques are necessary. Model-based approaches are widely used in the automotive domain, based on different types of models used in development phases at different abstraction levels. The Unified Modeling Language and the Systems Modeling Language are general-propose modeling languages that are widely used in the automotive domain. However, there are several domain-specific languages that support the automotive domain more specifically. A domain-specific SysML profile for functional and nonfunctional requirements in automotive technical systems has been proposed in our previous work. This paper describes our model-driven approach to specify domain-specific languages and corresponding domain-specific tools. The specifications are based on UML extensions using profiles only, which is a lightweight approach compared to other proposals. This allows the reuse and extension of existing UML or SysML models. A domain-specific graphical editor is presented in this paper based on the specified extensions. The resulting graphical editor is used to model an automotive technical system as an example.