Unified Requirements Modeling for Environmental Systems

Building environmentally friendly software and hardware systems is about understanding and respecting the requirements that are imposed by climate change or regulation. This is especially true, as those systems often require inter-disciplinary collaboration between domain experts who might not have a software or systems engineering background. Existing requirements models lack in three dimensions supporting this objective: First, they do not integrate approaches to explicitly model environmental requirements and possible hazards. Second, they do not provide visualizations that are intuitively understandable by non-system engineers. Third, there is no integrated tool-support for requirements modeling in a globally distributed set-up. We propose a unified requirements modeling language (URML) to address these problems. URML supports integrated requirements modeling as well as the cross-disciplinary visualization of environmental requirements, regulations and hazards. Furthermore we describe UNICASE, a tool for collaboration on these models allowing the visualization of traceability from climate critical requirements to their implementation in the system.