🤖 AI Summary
In industrial cyber-physical systems (ICPS) research, demonstration objectives are often ill-defined, and technical feasibility assessment is frequently decoupled from outcome validation. Method: This paper proposes a five-level demonstration framework grounded in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, systematically mapping demonstration goals to concrete research tasks and industrial use cases. It explicitly links work packages, verification metrics, and real-world scenarios, overcoming the vagueness and low operationality inherent in conventional Technology Readiness Level (TRL) frameworks. The approach integrates requirements engineering, modeling of software-intensive systems, and hierarchical framework design to support cross-phase requirements evolution analysis. Contribution/Results: Applied in two ICPS research projects, the framework effectively identified demonstration misalignments, refined requirement specifications, and significantly enhanced the precision, consistency, and rigor of feasibility assessment and project planning.
📝 Abstract
One of the challenges apparent in the organisation of research projects is the uncertainties around the subject of demonstrators. A precise and detailed elicitation of the coverage for project demonstrators is often an afterthought and not sufficiently detailed during proposal writing. This practice leads to continuous confusion and a mismatch between targeted and achievable demonstration of results, hindering progress. The reliance on the TRL scale as a loose descriptor does not help either. We propose a demonstrator requirements elaboration framework aiming to evaluate the feasibility of targeted demonstrations, making realistic adjustments, and assist in describing requirements. In doing so, we define 5 hierarchical levels of demonstration, clearly connected to expectations, e.g., work package interaction, and also connected to the project's industrial use-cases. The considered application scope in this paper is the domain of software-intensive systems and industrial cyber-physical systems. A complete validation is not accessible, as it would require application of our framework at the start of a project and observing the results at the end, taking 4-5 years. Nonetheless, we have applied it to two research projects from our portfolio, one at the early and another at the final stages, revealing its effectiveness.