RASAECO: Requirements Analysis of Software for the AECO Industry

TL;DR

This paper introduces RASAECO, a novel approach and tool for requirements analysis tailored to the AECO industry, addressing industry-specific challenges in digitalization and complex stakeholder needs.

Contribution

It presents a new scenario-based methodology, a common industry-specific language, and an ontology refinement process for better requirements engineering in AECO projects.

Findings

Validated on a digital twin project with 20 scenarios

Enhanced requirements elicitation for AECO-specific software

Improved communication between engineers and industry professionals

Abstract

Digitalization is forging its path in the architecture, construction, engineering, operation (AECO) industry. This trend demands not only solutions for data governance but also sophisticated cyber-physical systems with a high variety of stakeholder background and very complex requirements. Existing approaches to general requirements engineering ignore the context of the AECO industry. This makes it harder for the software engineers usually lacking the knowledge of the industry context to elicit, analyze and structure the requirements and to effectively communicate with AECO professionals. To live up to that task, we present an approach and a tool for collecting AECO-specific software requirements with the aim to foster reuse and leverage domain knowledge. We introduce a common scenario space, propose a novel choice of an ubiquitous language well-suited for this particular industry and develop a systematic way to refine the scenario ontologies based on the exploration of the scenario space. The viability of our approach is demonstrated on an ontology of 20 practical scenarios from a large project aiming to develop a digital twin of a construction site.