Towards Ethics-Driven Requirements Engineering: Integrating Critical Systems Heuristics and Ethical Guidelines for Autonomous Vehicles

Paper in proceeding, 2025

Context & Motivation: It is crucial to ensure ethical compliance for critical systems. The Ethical Framework by Guizzardi et al. offers structured guidance on ethical challenges. Critical Systems Heuristics (CSH) focus on stakeholder analysis, helping reveal assumptions in AV decision-making processes. Question/Problem: Despite these useful frameworks, only limited experience is documented and a lack of empirical studies hinders responsible software design. Principal Ideas/Results: Our vision is integrating Guizzardi et al.’s framework with CSH to support the requirements engineering (RE) process by (i) identifying and addressing diverse stakeholder, (ii) defining explicit boundaries or scope for the system under discussion, and (iii) promoting ethical considerations in requirements. Contributions: By applying established ethical guidelines and CSH retrospectively to realistic and complex case—an Automated Vehicle (AV) project with context specific ethical dilemmas—we show the potential and limitations of this research approach. We present a preliminary research design to investigate the applicability of established guidelines and CSH to a realistic project, thus enabling future research on ethical RE.