An RE'24 Workshop on Environment-Driven Requirements Engineering, Reykjavik, Iceland, June 24, 2024

     2024

Objectives:

In the days of AI, IoT, and human-cyber-physical systems, the environment, in which the software operates, becomes more diverse and evolves rapidly with stakeholders' changing needs. We believe it is high time for our community to revisit and reflect on the impact and implications of the so-called "E=mc2" theory in RE, whose basic tenet can be best summarized by Jackson's proposition: "requirements are located in the environment". This workshop is aimed at bringing interested researchers and practitioners together, exchanging ideas and visions, and exploring a set of open problems in the coming years. The workshop will include an invited keynote, paper presentations, and discussions. We plan to take advantage of the in-person gathering to organize a working session among all the participants to collaboratively discuss the problems and topics emerged in the keynote and paper presentations. [top]

Program:

Congratulations to the authors of the following accepted papers! The preliminary program is listed below; all times are local.

    9:10am-9:15am Welcome [Chair: Zhi Li]

    9:15am-10:15pm Session on modeling (about 30 minutes per paper, including Q&As) [Chair: Zhi Li]
        An Environmentally Complex Requirement for Safe Separation Distance between UAVs by Pedro Antonio Alarcon Granadeno, Arturo Miguel Russell Bernal, Md Nafee Al Islam, and Jane Cleland-Huang
        Building Device Models Using LLM for Requirements Simulation at Smart Homes by Shi Chen, Xiaohong Chen, and Zhi Jin

    10:15am-10:45am Coffee break

    10:45am-12:15pm Session on analysis (about 30 minutes per paper, including Q&As) [Chair: Xiaohong Chen]
        Extended Meta-Model of Problem Frames for Metaverse Human-Computer Interaction System by Yilong Yang, Yuyu Cheng, Juntao Gao, and Zhi Li
        A Microservice Decomposition Approach Driven by Sub-requirement References in Problem Diagrams by Yitao Bu, Hongbin Xiao, Zhi Li, and Xiaolan Xie
        Generating Requirements Documents for Embedded Systems: A Device Knowledge-Guided Approach by Chunhui Wang, Jiaqi Zhao, Xiaohong Chen, and Zhi Jin

    12:15pm-1:45pm Lunch

    1:45pm-3:15pm Session on specification and quality assurance (about 30 minutes per paper, including Q&As) [Chair: TBD]
        Deriving and Verifying B Specifications from Problem Frames Models via Model Transformation by Yang Simin, Xiao Hongbin, Li Zhi, and Xie Xiaolan
        CuneiForm Method for Assuring the Safety of ML-Based Computer Vision Development Datasets by Haider Al-Shareefy, Michael Butler, and Thai Son Hoang
        Enabling Efficient Real-Time Requirements Inconsistency Detection for Safety-Critical Systems by Yike Huang, Xiaohong Chen, Zhi Jin, and Tingliang Zhou

    3:15pm-3:45pm Summary and coffee break

Call for Papers:

Modeling the environment will be more and more important in RE when the systems will situate in the open world and with the human in the loop. For example, IoT-enabled systems, cyber-physical systems, AI-based systems, etc. are expected to be able to perceive the changes of an open and dynamic environment, respond to changes through architectural transformations, and exhibit context-aware, adaptive, and trustworthy behaivors.

Specifically for the AI-based systems, the components built by machine learning in fact are black boxes. It is not possible to structuring their functions by examining their architectures (consisting of a hierarchical neural networks). Their functions can only be represented by the effects imposed on their operational and interacting environment. These effects can in turn define the tasks of model training, validation, testing, deployment, and operation. When mapping the requirements into the environment properties or assertions, the benefits include natural decomposition and structuring of the problem. The "Environment-Driven Requirements Engineering" workshop thus solicits position, short, and full papers to provoke the discussions about:

Other emerging topics are encouraged and welcomed. We expect each position or short paper to be up to 4 pages long, whereas a long paper to be up to 8 pages long. However, if you need more or less space, feel free to contact the EnviRE'24 organizers. [top]

Submissions:

Please refer to the RE'24 page for formatting instructions, and submit your EnviRE'24 papers to: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=envire2024 . [top]

Important Dates:

All deadlines are 23:59 Anywhere on Earth (Standard Time). [top]

Program Committee:

Mounifah Alenazi, University of Hafr Albatin, Saudi Arabia
Tanmay Bhowmik, Mississippi State University, USA
Fuyuki Ishikawa, National Institute of Informatics, Japan
Eunsuk Kang, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Gunter Mussbacher, McGill University, Canada
Kenji Tei, Waseda University, Japan
Jianzhang Zhang, Hangzhou Normal University, China

Organiers:

Zhi Li, Guangxi Normal University, China
Xiaohong Chen, East China Normal University, China
Yijun Yu, The Open University, UK
Nan Niu, University of Cincinnati, USA



(Last updated: May 5, 2024) [top]