Dependability in RESCUE : A Concurrent Engineering Approach to the Specification of Requirements for Air Traffic Management

RESCUE is a concurrent engineering approach to the specification of operational requirements in the domain of air traffic management. In RESCUE, we build on use cases and scenarios, using work from human-computer interaction (HCI) and elsewhere in requirements engineering. Our aim is to provide some validation of the use case models through which requirements are elicited, and thereby obtain a more complete specification of requirements. We focus in particular on situations where things go wrong, in order to increase our understanding of issues relating to system dependability, and enable us to specify requirements which define how the system should behave under those circumstances. In this paper, we consider the way in which RESCUE uses work from requirements engineering, HCI and cognitive psychology to address some of the dependability problems which arise in the domain of air traffic management, and describe a proposed extension to the process which will further strengthen our approach to specifying requirements for dependable systems.