Requirements engineering in automotive development: experiences and challenges

In the automotive industry, especially in the high-end market, the complexity of electronic components is increasing rapidly. Currently, about a third of all development costs in high-end models go to electric and electronic system development, and the cost continues to grow. At the same time, many slightly different variations on components are each developed in a series of prototyping phases on different schedules. Consequently, the complexity of specification activities surpasses what conventional text-processing systems can support in terms of management and tracing functionality. Using real world projects as a foundation, the authors describe problems and solutions for requirements engineering in the automotive domain.