Project success in the automotive industry is highly influenced by requirements engineering (RE), for which communication and organisation structure play a major role, much due to the scale and distribution of these projects. However, empirical research is scarce on these aspects of automotive RE and warrants closer examination. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to identify problems or challenges in automotive RE with respect to communication and organisation structure. Using a multiple-case study approach, we collected data via 14 semi-structured interviews at one car manufacturer and one supplier. We tested our findings from the case study with a questionnaire distributed to practitioners in the automotive industry. Our results indicate that it is difficult but increasingly important to establish communication channels outside the fixed organisation structure and that responsibilities are often unclear. Product knowledge during early requirements elicitation and context knowledge later on is lacking. Furthermore, abstraction gaps between requirements on different abstraction levels leads to inconsistencies. For academia, we formulate a concrete agenda for future research. Practitioners can use the findings to broaden their understanding of how the problems manifest and to improve their organisations.

Most industrial embedded systems requirements are specified in natural language, hence they can sometimes be ambiguous and error-prone.Moreover, employing an early-stage model-based incremental system development using multiple levels of abstraction, for instance via architectural languages such as EAST-ADL, calls for different granularity requirements specifications described with abstraction-specific concepts that reflect the respective abstraction level effectively.In this paper, we propose a toolchain for structured requirements specification in the ReSA language, which scales to multiple EAST-ADL levels of abstraction.Furthermore, we introduce a consistency function that is seamlessly integrated into the specification toolchain, for the automatic analysis of requirements logical consistency prior to their temporal logic formalization for full formal verification.The consistency check subsumes two parts: (i) transforming ReSA requirements specification into boolean expressions, and (ii) checking the consistency of the resulting boolean expressions by solving the satisfiability of their conjunction with the Z3 SMT solver.For validation, we apply the ReSA toolchain on an industrial vehicle speed control system, namely the Adjustable Speed Limiter.

ISO 26262 is the new standard for automotive functional safety. This standard identifies major process steps across a large number of system stages as well as safety-related artifacts required as input and output of these steps. The VeriSpec project intends to identify the main challenges for the adoption of ISO 26262 by the heavy-vehicle industry and to provide useful and industrially relevant "components" (methods, tools etc.) required by the standard. The project work targets two main research goals: (i) requirement formalization support, including a usable front-end for specifying requirements by using patterns, and (ii) formal analysis of realizations in form of architectural models at various levels of abstraction, by model-checking the formal representations of the latter. In this paper, we present the current challenges facing industry and justifying VeriSpec, together with a preliminary roadmap for the research.

Component-based programming frameworks for industrial control logic development promise to shorten development and modification times, and to reduce programming errors. To get these benefits, it is, however, important that the components are specified and verified to work properly. This work introducesReusable Automation Components(RACs), which contain not only the implementation details but also a formal specification defining the correct use and behaviour of the component. This formal specification uses temporal logic to describe time-related properties and has a special structure developed to meet industrial control needs. The RAC can be formally verified, to determine whether the implementation fulfils the specification or not. A RAC prototype development tool has been developed to demonstrate this capability. The main difference between the RAC and other frameworks for formal verification of control logic is the specification modeling. In RAC, not only the implementation but also the specification is based on the structure and languages of conventional control logic, aiming at being easy to comprehend for control logic engineers. Several industrial examples are discussed in this paper, showing the benefits and potential of the framework.

Quickly adapting the manufacturing system to the production of new or modified products is critical for manufacturers in order to stay competitive. For flexible manufacturing systems this typically implies modifications of the control programs. In previous work a framework for automatic generation of cell controllers has been developed. In this paper an implementation of the framework is presented. Important properties of the presented implementation are: the information from earlier design phases is reused; automatic code generation for faster development and reduced implementation errors; the supervisory control theory is used to generate control functions that are correct by construction; object oriented principles are used in order to allow the reuse of existing library functions. The implementation is generic in the sense that it may generate control programs for a number of target platforms, but in this paper the focus is on generating a control program for the Java platform. An industrial example of a reconfigurable manufacturing cell has been used in the implementation process and shows that the framework is feasible for large manufacturing systems.

A framework for component based distributed control software is proposed. The primary application for the framework is in distributed control systems. The framework proposes new software components, called automation components that can be hierarchically embedded to produce new components. Automation components are also combined to produce hierarchical component based applications. The framework is independent of the execution platform, however it is shown how an application that is developed using the framework can be executed using IEC 61499 platform. The validity of the framework is evaluated using an industrial example of a reconfigurable manufacturing cell.

The execution model in a new standard for distributed control systems, IEC 61499, is analyzed. It is shown how the same standard compliant application running in two different standard compliant runtime environments may result in completely different behaviors. Thus, to achieve true portability of applications between multiple standard compliant runtime environments a more detailed execution model is necessary. In this paper a new runtime environment, Fuber, is presented along with a formal execution model. In this case the execution model is given as a set of interacting state machines which makes it straightforward to analyze the behavior of the application and runtime together using existing tools for formal verification.