Volume 16, Number 1

Traffic Light Control Systems: Requirements Engineering

  Authors

Ahmad Audat, Marah Yahia, Said Ghoul and Maram Bani Younes, Philadelphia University, Jordan

  Abstract

Requirements Engineering (RE) is the most important activity and pivot phase in the software development life cycle. It consists mainly of requirements analysis, design, and specification. The application of RE in a business domain aims to generalize its different specific approaches by meta-models under which each specific approach is an instance or specialization. RE is being applied more and more in different business domains, and its application benefits are found to be valuable. Despite these active RE applications and their added values in different domains, the Traffic Light Control (TLC) domain has not yet been approached, regardless of its everyday interest. The work presented in this paper is part of a TLC enhancement project that explores RE's potential contributions to leveraging TLC quality. Thus, in this work, different recent specific approaches to TLC are analyzed, and a large part of this business domain's functional/ non-functional requirements are elicited and specified. Moreover, the traffic context-aware traffic light control systems (CTLC) are also considered. They are deeply analyzed and compared to the typical TLC systems. As a primary result, the tangling of different concerns was stated, and a separate concerns paradigm was applied. This leads to requirements specification through separated agents. This should lead to TLC and CTLC systems development and maintenance cost reduction. An important agent dealing with security aspects and their evolving technologies is introduced. The impact evaluations of the RE on some TLC and CTLC current approaches are also presented.

  Keywords

Requirements Engineering (RE), Traffic Light Control (TLC), Context-aware Traffic Light Control (CTLC), Separation of concerns, Software maintenance, Security, Integrity, Traceability, Likability.