Strategic requirements engineering for complex sustainable systems

The development of complex sustainable systems presents a number of challenges in requirements engineering (RE). It is difficult to elicit, analyze, and specify interdisciplinary system requirements that have to be fulfilled in order to develop a complex sustainable system. This paper argues for a need for a significant shift in the underlying RE ideas and premises in order to effectively cope with RE challenges of complex sustainable systems development. We present the main requirements for the development of strategic RE methods based on a number of systems, methodological, and epistemological perspective shifts. Strategic RE paradigm shift facilitates adaptation of primarily technological system-specific RE knowledge in order to handle large scale interdisciplinary sustainability-related RE challenges. (c) 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Eng 16