An Extended Meta-Model of Problem Frames for Enriching Environmental Descriptions

Problem Frames (PF) have attracted extensive attention and research in the requirements engineering community, particularly in the field of modeling environment-based CyberPhysical Systems (CPS). This paper proposes an approach based on the combination of PF and model-driven engineering (MDE). The approach builds an extended meta-model of the Problem Frames approach to support representing causal behaviours of the environment of CPS, which are essential domain knowledge of the environment for modelling CPS requirements and complexity analysis. EMF (Eclipse Model Framework) and the Sirius technology are used to create GUI items for the meta-model and provide a platform for modeling tools based on the Eclipse environment for PF modelers. An example case study is used to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.