Join us at 11:30, Monday, room 2.1, and discuss:

• From Scribe to Architect: The evolution of the Requirements Engineer into the Master Architect of trust and governance for autonomous systems.

• The New Engine: How "Requirements as Transactions," powered by Web3 and AI, transforms system design from static blueprints to dynamic, self-enforcing contracts.

• From Bottleneck to Keystone: Extending Requirements Engineering from a centralized approach to enabling element of decentralized and secured multi-party collaboration.

• The Impact on the Technology Stack: Examining the entire technology stack, from Software and Data Engineering to AI Systems and the global Command and Control of Digital Twins.

The Industrial Metaverse promises a new frontier of innovation, powered by interconnected, physics-based Digital Twins that mirror our physical reality. However, this hyper-connected ecosystem conceals a critical vulnerability: silent instability. Digital Twins are not static; they evolve constantly and asynchronously, driven by probabilistic AI models. Minor misalignments in their requirements create cascading failures, causing system predictability to degrade exponentially, and threatening the stability of the entire network.

Current requirements engineering tools, built on centralized, hierarchical architectures, are fundamentally mismatched for this decentralized, peer-to-peer world. They create a single point of failure, a "centralized bottleneck" that cannot bridge the "trust gap" between competing stakeholders who will never cede control of their sovereign data. This architectural mismatch prevents the very collaboration the metaverse is meant to enable.

This talk proposes a new foundation: a decentralized, multi-party requirements management framework built on Web3 principles. We introduce a paradigm shift from static descriptions to "Requirements as Transactions" - immutable, traceable, and verifiable states on a shared ledger. In this model, smart contracts act as autonomous, impartial agents, automatically validating changes and enforcing agreed-upon rules to maintain system stability. This elevates the role of the Requirements Engineer from a mere scribe to an "Architect of Trust and Governance" for complex AI systems of systems. To become THE Architect of a system.

We will ground this vision in the real world through high-stakes use cases, from the precision-critical semiconductor industry, where a misaligned requirement means millions in losses, to a multi-layered robotic apple-picking system that illustrates the challenges across software, data, and AI engineering. Ultimately, we will explore this framework as a "social contract for AI," posing critical questions about the future of requirement engineering, AI safety, and the new skills required to build the cathedrals of a connected reality.