The RESCUE project

"Requirements Engineering with Scenarios in User-Centred Environments"

Project description

RESCUE is an innovative process, with software tool support, for specifying requirements for socio-technical systems. Process guidance and the software tools have been tailored to the air traffic control domain. It integrates applied research and best-practice in:

Human activity modelling, to provide an understanding of how people work, in order to baseline possible changes to it;
Scenario-based requirements engineering using our ART-SCENE environment, to improve communication with stakeholders and acquire complete, precise and testable requirements from them;
System modelling with the i* formalism and our REDEPEND tool, to model the future system boundaries, actor dependencies and most important system goals;
Requirements management based on the VOLERE shell ;
Requirements acquisition using ACRE (Maiden & Rugg 1996), a framework for selecting the right acquisition techniques in different situations;
Innovative techniques for creative requirements engineering, run at the beginning of the process to discover and surface requirements and design ideas that are essential for system modelling and use case authoring.

RESCUE supports a concurrent engineering process in which different modelling and analysis processes take place in parallel. Furthermore the use of creativity workshops encourages requirements and design ideas to be discovered and elaborated together, so that requirements inform high-level design selection, and candidate acceptable designs restrict and constrain requirements to those that are viable.

Successful uses of the RESCUE process

RESCUE has been successfully applied to determine stakeholder requirements for CORA-2 (Conflict Resolution Assistant), a system that will provide computerised assistance to air traffic controllers to resolve potential conflicts between aircraft. It is currently being applied again in the NATS-DMAN project to determine requirements for Eurocontrol's Departure Manager system; in the MSP project to identify requirements for Eurocontrol's Multi-Sector Planning System and in the EASM project to assist NATS in determining the feasibility and options for Flexible Use of Airspace.

Staff and funding

Principal investigator: Prof Neil Maiden
Research staff: Dr Sara Jones
Total funding: £193,548
Funding source: Eurocontrol
Duration: From September 2000 with continued funding.

Project collaborators

Eurocontrol

RESCUE documentation

REDEPEND software

Click here to dowload the REDEPEND software

Tutorials

Key Publications Include

Maiden N.A.M., Kamdar N. & Bush D., 2006, 'Analysing I* System Models for Dependability Properties: The Uberlingen Accident', Proceedings REFSQ'2006 Mini-Conference, in conjunction with CaiSE'2006, 5-6 2006, Luxembourg.
Jones S.V., Maiden N.A.M., Zachos K. & Zhu X., 2005, 'How Service-Centric Systems Change the Requirements Process', Proceedings REFSQ'2005 Workshop, in conjunction with CaiSE'2005, 13-14 2005, Porto, Portugal, 105-119.
Maiden, N.A.M., Robertson, S., & Gizikis, A., 2004, 'Provoking Creativity: Imagine What Your Requirements Could be Like', IEEE Software, 21(5), Sept/Oct 2004, pp68-75.
Maiden, N.A.M., Jones, S.V., Manning, S., Greenwood, J. & Renou, L., 'Model-Driven Requirements Engineering: Synchronising Models in an Air Traffoc Management Case Study', Proceedings 16th Int. Conf., CAiSE 2004, Riga, Latvia, June 2004, LNCS 3084, Anne Persson and Janis Stirna (eds), Springer, pp368-383'.
Maiden N.A.M., Manning S., Jones S. & Greenwood J., 2004, 'Towards Pattern-Based Generation of Requirements from Systems Models', Proceedings REFSQ'2004 Workshop, in conjunction with CaiSE'2004, 7-8 2004, Riga, Latvia.
Maiden, N.A.M., & Jones, S.V., 2004, 'Dependability in RESCUE: A Concurrent Engineering Approach to the Specification of Requirements for Air Traffic Management', in proceedings of the Dependability, Systems and Networks workshop on interdisciplinary approaches, June 2004.
Jones, S.V., Maiden, N.A.M., Manning, S. & Greenwood, J., 2004, 'Human Activity Modelling in the Specification of Operational Requirements: Work in Progress', 'Proceedings Workshop W1L, Bridging the Gaps II: Bridging the Gaps between Software Engineering and Human-Computer Interaction, 24th - 25th May, 2004, at ICSE2004, 26th International Conference on Software Engineering, Edinburgh, Scotland.'
Maiden N.A.M., Seyff N. & Grunbacher P., 2004, 'The Mobile Scenario Presenter: Integrating Contextual Inquiry and Structured Walkthroughs', Proceedings 2nd International Workshop on Distributed and Mobile Collaboration (DMC 2004), within 13th IEEE International Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructures for Collaborative Enterprises (WETICE-2004), IEEE Computer Society Press.'
Maiden N.A.M., Manning S., Robertson S. & Greenwood J., 2004, 'Integrating Creativity Workshops into Structured Requirements Processes', Proceedings DIS'2004, Cambridge Mass, ACM Press, 113-122.
Maiden, N.A.M., Manning, S., Jones, S.V. & Greenwood, J. 'Pattern-Based Generation of Requirements from System Models'.
Jones, S. & Maiden, N.A.M., 2004, 'RESCUE: An Integrated Method for Specifying Requirements for Complex Socio-Technical Systems', to appear in Requirements Engineering for Sociotechnical Systems, J.L. Mate and A. Silva (eds), Idea Group Inc., 2004.
Mavin, A. & Maiden, N.A.M., 2003, 'Determining Socio-Technical Systems Requirements: Experiences with Generating and Walking Through Scenarios', Proceedings 11th International Conference on Requirements Engineering, IEEE Computer Society Press, 213-222.
Maiden, N.A.M., Jones, S.V. & Flynn, M., 2003, 'Innovative Requirements Engineering Applied to ATM', Proceedings ATM (Air Traffic Management) 2003, Budapest, June 23-27 2003.
Maiden, N.A.M., Jones, S.V. & Flynn, M., 2003, 'Integrating RE Methods to Support Use Case Based Requirements Specification', Poster paper, Proceedings 11th International Conferenceon Requirements Engineering, IEEE Computer Society Press, 369-370.

Centre for HCI Design