Scenario-based Requirements Engineering for Complex Smart City Projects

TL;DR

This paper presents a scenario-based requirements engineering approach for complex Smart City projects, enabling stakeholders and technical teams to align goals and requirements iteratively through formalized scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a novel scenario-based requirements engineering method that connects different abstraction levels to improve goal alignment in Smart City projects.

Findings

Effective stakeholder alignment achieved in case study.

Enhanced feedback loops for requirements validation.

Improved synchronization of technical and stakeholder goals.

Abstract

Various stakeholders with different backgrounds are involved in Smart City projects. These stakeholders define the project goals, e.g., based on participative approaches, market research or innovation management processes. To realize these goals often complex technical solutions must be designed and implemented. In practice, however, it is difficult to synchronize the technical design and implementation phase with the definition of moving Smart City goals. We hypothesize that this is due to a lack of a common language for the different stakeholder groups and the technical disciplines. We address this problem with scenario-based requirements engineering techniques. In particular, we use scenarios at different levels of abstraction and formalization that are connected end-to-end by appropriate methods and tools. This enables fast feedback loops to iteratively align technical requirements, stakeholder expectations, and Smart City goals. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach in a case study with different industry partners.