A Lightweight Multilevel Markup Language for Connecting Software Requirements and Simulations

[Context] Simulation is a powerful tool to validate specified requirements especially for complex systems that constantly monitor and react to characteristics of their environment. The simulators for such systems are complex themselves as they simulate multiple actors with multiple interacting functions in a number of different scenarios. To validate requirements in such simulations, the requirements must be related to the simulation runs. [Problem] In practice, engineers are reluctant to state their requirements in terms of structured languages or models that would allow for a straightforward relation of requirements to simulation runs. Instead, the requirements are expressed as unstructured natural language text that is hard to assess in a set of complex simulation runs. Therefore, the feedback loop between requirements and simulation is very long or non-existent at all. [Principal idea] We aim to close the gap between requirements specifications and simulation by proposing a lightweight markup language for requirements. Our markup language provides a set of annotations on different levels that can be applied to natural language requirements. The annotations are mapped to simulation events. As a result, meaningful information from a set of simulation runs is shown directly in the requirements specification. [Contribution] Instead of forcing the engineer to write requirements in a specific way just for the purpose of relating them to a simulator, the markup language allows annotating the already specified requirements up to a level that is interesting for the engineer. We evaluate our approach by analyzing 8 original requirements of an automotive system in a set of 100 simulation runs

From Social Simulation to Integrative System Design

As the recent financial crisis showed, today there is a strong need to gain "ecological perspective" of all relevant interactions in socio-economic-techno-environmental systems. For this, we suggested to set-up a network of Centers for integrative systems design, which shall be able to run all potentially relevant scenarios, identify causality chains, explore feedback and cascading effects for a number of model variants, and determine the reliability of their implications (given the validity of the underlying models). They will be able to detect possible negative side effect of policy decisions, before they occur. The Centers belonging to this network of Integrative Systems Design Centers would be focused on a particular field, but they would be part of an attempt to eventually cover all relevant areas of society and economy and integrate them within a "Living Earth Simulator". The results of all research activities of such Centers would be turned into informative input for political Decision Arenas. For example, Crisis Observatories (for financial instabilities, shortages of resources, environmental change, conflict, spreading of diseases, etc.) would be connected with such Decision Arenas for the purpose of visualization, in order to make complex interdependencies understandable to scientists, decision-makers, and the general public.Comment: 34 pages, Visioneer White Paper, see http://www.visioneer.ethz.c