Requirements Engineering for Cyber-Physical Systems Challenges in the Context of "Industrie 4.0"

According to a widely shared view, manufacturing is currently undergoing its fourth industrial revolution, termed "Industrie 4.0" in the high-tech strategy of the German government. Smart Factories with vertically and horizontally integrated production systems are enabled through the realization of machines, storage systems and utilities as Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), which are able to share information, act, and control each other autonomously. The development of CPS requires the collaboration of different disciplines, like mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and computer science. This creates new challenges for Requirements Engineering (RE), which needs to establish a common perception of the targeted CPS for the involved stakeholders. This paper will elaborate the specific challenges in RE for CPS based on a literature review. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is used as an approach to automatically translate shared informal requirements specifications to formal domain specific models for the involved disciplines, to develop a comprehensive RE methodology for CPS.