Documenting Assumptions About the Operational Context of Long-Living Collaborative Embedded Systems

Today’s embedded systems operate in highly interactive collaborative system networks to fullfill an overall purpose within a complex technical system (e.g., motor vehicles, aircrafts, industrial plants). The lifespan of such complex technical systems typically covers several decades in which a modernization or replacement of individual embedded systems is accompanied by high efforts and costs. Consequently, collaborative embedded systems need to be designed to cope with changes in their operational context throughout the prospective lifespan. In this paper, we outline the advantage of explicitly documenting assumptions about the operational context of long-living collaborative embedded systems. Documenting assumptions about the operational context fosters the engineering of collaborative embedded systems insofar that these systems are able to cope with specific changes in their operational context throughout their lifespan.