RASAECO: Requirements Analysis of Software for the AECO Industry
This addresses the problem of inefficient requirements analysis for software engineers and AECO professionals in a domain-specific context, but it is incremental as it builds on existing requirements engineering methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of software requirements engineering in the AECO industry by presenting an approach and tool that uses a common scenario space and ubiquitous language to improve elicitation and reuse, demonstrated on an ontology of 20 practical scenarios from a digital twin project.
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.