Complying with Law for RE in the Automotive Domain

The automotive industry is concerned with developing large and complex embedded systems. The original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are responsible for the safety of their systems, enforced by law in terms of liability. At the same time, there is a number of laws, for example the Automobile Safety Act, that has to be obeyed by the specification. We give insights into the current state of practice about how the automotive industry performs requirements engineering in order to comply with government laws and regulations. We analyse the challenges, and give ideas from research work in progress for tackling them.