Requirements@run.time will explore a radical challenge to the traditional view of requirements models as static, slowly-evolving and purely design-time entities. Requirements@run.time will explore the potential for runtime abstractions and models of requirements as a practical means to address the challenges posed by volatile or poorly-understood environmental contexts. These include business environments that are subject to dramatic and unforeseen economic conditions, or physical environments that may be remote and hostile to humans and computers.

For such systems, detailed a-priori domain understanding is not achievable at design-time. This inevitably acts against the formulation of stable requirements. Rather, the requirements will need to be revised and reappraised over periods too short to be achieved by off-line adaptive maintenance. To achieve this, systems will need to maintain requirements models that are dynamic, runtime entities that support reasoning, sometimes with the aid of human, and sometimes not, so that the systems can respond in appropriate ways to changes in their environments. requirements@run.time takes its cue from important recent work in a number of areas, including requirements monitoring, computational reflection, self-adaptive systems and multi-objective reasoning.