Integration and promotion of autonomy with the ARE framework

The integration and promotion of autonomy in software-intensive systems is an extremely challenging task. Among the many challenges the engineers must overcome are those related to the elicitation and expression of autonomy requirements. Striving to solve this problem, Lero the Irish Software Engineering Research Center has developed an Autonomy Requirements Engineering (ARE) approach within the mandate of a joint project with ESA, the European Space Agency. The approach is intended to help system engineers tackle the integration and promotion of autonomy in software-intensive systems, e.g., space-exploration robots. To handle autonomy requirements, ARE provides a requirements engineering baseline where despite their principle differences in application domain and functionality all autonomous and self-adaptive systems are expected to extend upstream the regular software-intensive systems with special self-managing objectives (self-* objectives). Basically, the self-* objectives provide the system’s ability to automatically discover, diagnose, and cope with various problems. ARE emphasizes this ability as being driven by the system’s degree of autonomicity, quality and quantity of knowledge, awareness and monitoring capabilities, and quality attributes such as adaptability, dynamicity, robustness, resilience, and mobility. As part of its successful validation, ARE was applied to capture the autonomy requirements for the ESA’s BepiColombo unmanned space exploration mission.