A conceptual framework for requirements engineering

A framework for assessing research and practice in requirements engineering is proposed. The framework is used to survey state of the art research contributions and practice. The framework considers a task activity view of requirements, and elaborates different views of requirements engineering (RE) depending on the starting point of a system development. Another perspective is to analyse RE from different conceptions of products and their properties. RE research is examined within this framework and then placed in the context of how it extends current system development methods and systems analysis techniques.     

A computational framework for authoring and searching product design specifications

The development of product design specifications (PDS) is an important part of the product development process. Incompleteness, ambiguity, or inconsistency in the PDS can lead to problems during the design process and may require unnecessary design iterations. This generally results in increased design time and cost. Currently, in many organizations, PDS are written using word processors. Since documents written by different authors can be inconsistent in style and word choice, it is difficult to automatically search for specific requirements. Moreover, this approach does not allow the possibility of automated design verification and validation against the design requirements and specifications.In this paper, we present a computational framework and a software tool based on this framework for writing, annotating, and searching computer-interpretable PDS. Our approach allows authors to write requirement statements in natural language to be consistent with the existing authoring practice. However, using mathematical expressions, keywords from predefined taxonomies, and other metadata the author of PDS can then annotate different parts of the requirement statements. This approach provides unambiguous meaning to the information contained in PDS, and helps to eliminate mistakes later in the process when designers must interpret requirements. Our approach also enables users to construct a new PDS document from the results of the search for requirements of similar devices and in similar contexts. This capability speeds up the process of creating PDS and helps authors write more detailed documents by utilizing previous, well written PDS documents. Our approach also enables checking for internal inconsistencies in the requirement statements.     

On technology for functional requirement-based reference design retrieval in engineering knowledge management

Engineering design is a knowledge-intensive process, and includes conceptual design, detailed design, engineering analysis, assembly design, process design, and performance evaluation. Each of these tasks involves various aspects of technical knowledge and experience. Whether this technical knowledge and experience can be effectively shared is key to increasing product development capability and quality, and also to reducing the duration and cost of the development cycle. Consequently, providing engineering designers various query methods for retrieving engineering knowledge is one of the most important tasks in engineering knowledge management.The study develops a technology for functional requirement-based reference design retrieval as a decision support mechanism, which can assist engineering designers to retrieve relevant design and associated knowledge for reference in conducting functional requirements of a product. This study involves the following tasks: (i) designing a functional requirement-based reference design retrieval process, (ii) developing techniques related to the technology for functional requirement-based reference design retrieval, and (iii) implementing a functional requirement-based reference design retrieval mechanism. The retrieval process includes the steps of functional requirement-based query, case searching and matching, and case ranking. The technology involves (i) a structured query model for functional requirements, (ii) an index structures for historical design cases, (iii) functional requirement-based case searching and matching mechanisms, (iv) a functional requirement-based case ranking mechanism, and (v) a case-based representation of designed entities. Finally, the experimental example with indexing and retrieving similar designed entities is conducted to demonstrate the proposed techniques worked efficiently.     

Developing a multi-layer reference design retrieval technology for knowledge management in engineering design

Engineering design is a knowledge-intensive process that encompasses conceptual design, detailed design, engineering analysis, assembly design, process design, and performance evaluation. Each of these tasks involves various areas of knowledge and experience. The sharing of such knowledge and experience is critical to increasing the capacity for developing products and to increasing their quality. It is also critical to reducing the duration and cost of the development cycle. Accordingly, offering engineering designers various methods for retrieving engineering knowledge is one of the most important tasks in managing engineering knowledge.

This study develops a multi-layer reference design retrieval technology for engineering knowledge management to provide engineering designers with easy access to relevant design and related knowledge. The tasks performed in this research include (i) designing a multi-layer reference design retrieval process, (ii) developing techniques associated with multi-layer reference design retrieval technology, and (iii) implementing a multi-layer reference design retrieval mechanism. The retrieval process contains three main phases—‘customer requirement-based reference design retrieval’, ‘functional requirement-based reference design retrieval’ and ‘functional feature-based reference design retrieval’. This technology involves (1) customer requirement-based reference design retrieval, which involves a structured query model for customer requirements, a case-based representation of designed entities, a customer requirement-based index structure for historical design cases, and customer requirement-based case searching, matching and ranking mechanisms, (2) functional requirement-based reference design retrieval, which includes a structured query model for functional requirements, a functional requirement-based index structure for historical design cases, and functional requirement-based case searching, matching and ranking mechanisms, and (3) functional feature-based reference design retrieval, which is a binary code-based representation for functional features, an ART1 neural network for functional feature-based case clustering and functional feature-based case ranking.     

An integrative approach to requirements analysis: How task models support requirements reuse in a user-centric design framework

Many software systems fail to address their intended purpose because of a lack of user involvement and requirements deficiencies. This paper discusses the elaboration of a requirements-analysis process that integrates a critical-parameter-based approach to task modeling within a user-centric design framework. On one hand, adapting task models to capture requirements bridges the gap between scenarios and critical parameters which benefits design from the standpoint of user involvement and accurate requirements. On the other hand, using task models as a reusable component leverages requirements reuse which benefits design by increasing quality while simultaneously reducing development costs and time-to-market. First, we present the establishment of both a user-centric and reuse-centric requirements process along with its implementation within an integrated design tool suite. Secondly, we report the design, procedures, and findings of two user studies aimed at assessing the feasibility for novice designers to conduct the process as well as evaluating the resulting benefits upon requirements-analysis deliverables, requirements quality, and requirements reuse.     

公理化设计框架下产品设计知识重用的关键技术

针对具有层次性、多属性特点的复杂产品设计过程,对公理化设计框架下的产品设计重用技术进行了研究。通过建立公理化设计框架将复杂产品设计过程进行分解,形成产品设计的需求域、功能域、结构域与工艺域的Z形映射关系,提出一种基于实例的综合考虑设计域间和域内设计信息的知识重用方法,采用基于相似度的知识重用检索算法,获得符合设计要求的最佳重用对象,并以实例进行了验证。     

A design methodology for form-based knowledge reuse and representation

Paper forms are regularly used for collecting and disseminating knowledge in offices; they are a natural way of eliciting requirements of knowledge workers. Many organizations have implemented a groupware system to integrate the organizational knowledge and support knowledge creation. However, design methods for flexible form-based knowledge reuse and representation are limited. We developed a methodology based on the enhanced cognitive fit theory; it utilizes factoring and synthesis principles to manipulate form-based knowledge. The methodology was articulated using the design science research methodology. A prototype embedded methodology was built to support a knowledge worker in knowledge creation and reuse in a high tech firm. The resulting system allowed flexible form-based knowledge creation that was useful for problem solving and exploiting opportunities. Implications and conclusions are discussed.     

Capturing and reusing knowledge in engineering change management: A case of automobile development

The development of complex products, such as automobiles, involves engineering changes that frequently require redesigning or altering the products. Although it has been found that efficient management of knowledge and collaboration in engineering changes is crucial for the success of new product development, extant systems for engineering changes focus mainly on storing documents related to the engineering changes or simply automating the approval processes, while the knowledge that is generated from collaboration and decision-making processes may not be captured and managed easily. This consequently limits the use of the systems by the participants in engineering change processes. This paper describes a model for knowledge management and collaboration in engineering change processes, and based on the model, builds a prototype system that demonstrates the model’s strengths. We studied a major Korean automobile company to analyze the automobile industry’s unique requirements regarding engineering changes. We also developed domain ontologies from the case to facilitate knowledge sharing in the design process. For achieving efficient retrieval and reuse of past engineering changes, we used a case-based reasoning (CBR) with a concept-based similarity measure.

Fostering continuous innovation in design with an integrated knowledge management approach

In the global competition, companies are propelled by an immense pressure to innovate. The trend to produce more new knowledge-intensive products or services and the rapid progress of information technologies arouse huge interest on knowledge management for innovation. However the strategy of knowledge management is not widely adopted for innovation in industries due to a lack of an effective approach of their integration. This study aims to help the designers to innovate more efficiently based on an integrated approach of knowledge management. Based on this integrated approach, a prototype of distributed knowledge management system for innovation is developed. An industrial application is presented and its initial results indicate the applicability of the approach and the prototype in practice.     

A goal-driven and agent-based requirements engineering framework*

The paper presents a requirements engineering framework (REF), where advanced requirements engineering techniques are combined with software quality modelling approaches to provide an environment within which the stakeholders and the analysts can easily cooperate to discover, organise, reconcile and validate the requirements for a new system. By adopting a basic and essential graphical notation, and a clear top-down methodology, REF allows for an effective involvement of the stakeholders, assisting and driving them to an early definition of the desired system's functionalities and quality attributes, while supporting the redesign of the encompassing organisational context to better exploit the new system's capabilities. As a case study, REF is applied to support the requirements engineering process for a complex software-intensive simulation system. Results demonstrate the feasibility of REF and the benefits it offers to the requirements engineering process, but also to the subsequent system development phases. As illustrated through the case study REF can, in fact, be usefully applied as a forerunner for unified modelling language (UML)-based approaches.*Part of this work was completed while the author was Senior Research Fellow with the Computing Information Systems Engineering Group, at the Royal Military College of Science, Cranfield University (UK)     

Expanding bottleneck management from manufacturing to product design and engineering processes

Bottlenecks inhibit the performance of companies. Up to now, bottleneck management research has concentrated on manufacturing processes, while neglecting product design and engineering processes. This research fills this gap through developing and testing of a new bottleneck management concept for product design and engineering processes. The new concept is developed using a system theory modelling approach and comprises of four bottleneck management counter measures. Two propositions were developed to test the concept through an event-discrete simulation model. The simulation is grounded on empirical data from three design-driven companies and tests the impact of the four bottleneck management counter measures on the performance of product design and engineering processes. The findings from the simulation confirm the applicability of the newly developed bottleneck concept to improve the performance of product design and engineering processes. In doing so, this research study expands bottleneck management for the first time from manufacturing to product design and engineering processes.     

A knowledge based component/service repository to enhance analysts’ domain knowledge for requirements analysis

Knowledge of the business domain (e.g., insurance claim, human resources) is crucial to analysts’ ability to conduct good requirements analysis (RA). However, current practices afford little assistance to analysts in acquiring domain knowledge. We argue that traditional reuse repositories could be augmented by adding rich faceted information on component/services and artifacts such as business-process templates to help analysts acquire domain knowledge during RA. In this paper, we present the design of a Knowledge Based Component Repository (KBCR) for facilitating RA. Then, we report on the design and development of a KBCR prototype. We illustrate its application in a system that is populated with components and process templates for the auto insurance claim domain. An empirical study was conducted to assess its effectiveness in improving RA. Results showed that KBCR enhanced analysts’ business domain knowledge and helped them better prepare for RA. Our key research contribution is to offer analysts a rich repository (i.e., KBCR) containing domain knowledge that they could utilize to acquire domain knowledge that is crucial for carrying out RA. While repositories of reusable components have been employed for some time, no one has used such repositories to help analysts acquire domain knowledge in order improve the RA of the system.     

A user requirement driven framework for collaborative design knowledge management

In today’s competitive global marketplace and knowledge-based economy, user requirement becomes an important input information for enterprises to develop new product and a critical factor to drive product collaborative design evolution. Meanwhile, there remains no consensus on how best to support knowledge activities and significant challenges to establishing design information management facing to rapid collaborative product development with dynamic user requirement. This paper introduces solutions for designer to deal with dynamic user requirement information through requirement evaluation and prediction method. In this study, we propose a user requirements-oriented knowledge management concept that is based on a four level hierarchy map model with special regard to knowledge collaboration and information communication. Furthermore, a novel distributed concurrent and interactive user requirement database was constructed, and the framework driven by user requirement was put forward to support collaborative design knowledge management. Finally, the service robot design project of a start-up company is used as a case study to explain the implementation of proposed framework.     

A hypernetwork-based approach to collaborative retrieval and reasoning of engineering design knowledge

Complex product development increasingly entails creation and sharing of design knowledge in a collaborative and integrated working environment. In this context, it has become a central issue to address the multifaceted feature of design knowledge for such a collaborative knowledge sharing scheme. This paper proposes a hypernetwork-based approach to explicitly capturing the relationships between various elements in a multifaceted knowledge representation. Specifically, a knowledge hypernetwork model is constructed, which is composed of a designer network, a product network, an issue network and a knowledge unit network. The relationships between various nodes from different networks are identified and defined according to specific node properties. In addition, topological characteristics of the hypernetwork structure are analyzed together with the statistical indicators. Based on this model, the Bayesian approach is adopted to conduct the collaborative reasoning process whereby knowledge elements relevant to the current design task are recommended according to the issues to be resolved and the current design context. A case study conducted in this work shows that the proposed approach is effective in capturing the complex relationships between multi-faceted knowledge elements and enables collaborative retrieval and reasoning of knowledge records.     

Knowledge management of product design: A requirements-oriented knowledge management framework based on Kansei engineering and knowledge map

For the knowledge management of product design, knowledge innovation is the foundation and motivation for the independent innovation and enhancing the core competitiveness. Most of the product knowledge exists in the brain of designers. How to obtain the required knowledge accurately in massive knowledge database becomes the key to knowledge innovation. However, the design knowledge based on consumer’s requirement has not been extensively studied. There is no consensus on the reasonable and effective implementation of the knowledge management framework to select the optimum design knowledge based on the consumer’s requirements. In this study, to efficiently realize the knowledge acquisition and knowledge selection, a requirements-oriented knowledge management model is established, with the advantage of Kansei engineering in knowledge acquisition and multi-objective decision-making in knowledge selection. Finally, the outdoor leisure chairs design is used as a case study to explain the implementation of the knowledge management framework. To reveal the advantages of the framework, it was compared with other frameworks. The results show that the proposed knowledge management framework is more efficient and provided a method of designers to acquire design knowledge based on the consumer’s requirements.     

A requirements engineering framework for cross-organizational ERP systems

The development of cross-organizational enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions is becoming increasingly critical to the business strategy of many networked companies. The major function of cross-organizational ERP solutions is to coordinate work in two or more organizations. However, how to align ERP application components and business requirements for coordination and cooperation is hardly known. This paper reports on the outcomes of applying a coordination theory perspective to an analysis of the ERP misalignment problem. We present a conceptual framework for analyzing coordination and cooperation requirements in inter-organizational ERP projects. The framework makes explicit the undocumented built-in assumptions for coordination and cooperation that may have significant implications for the ERP adopters and incorporates a library of existing coordination mechanisms supported by modern ERP systems. We use it to develop a proposal for how to achieve a better alignment between ERP implementations and supported business coordination processes in inter-organizational settings. We report on some early assessments of the implications of our framework for practicing requirements engineers. Both our framework and library rest on a literature survey and the first author’s experience with ERP implementation. In future empirical research, we will further validate and refine our framework.     

A measurement framework for assessing the maturity of requirements engineering process

Because requirements engineering (RE) problems are widely acknowledged as having a major impact on the effectiveness of the software development process, Sommerville et al. have developed a requirements maturity model. However, research has shown that the measurement process within Sommerville’s model is ambiguous, and implementation of his requirements maturity model leads to confusion. Hence, the objective of our research is to propose a new RE maturity measurement framework (REMMF) based on Sommerville’s model and to provide initial validation of REMMF. The main purpose of proposing REMMF is to allow us to more effectively measure the maturity of the RE processes being used within organisations and to assist practitioners in measuring the maturity of their RE processes. In order to evaluate REMMF, two organisations implemented the measurement framework within their IT divisions, provided us with an assessment of their requirements process and gave feedback on the REMMF measurement process. The results show that our measurement framework is clear, easy to use and provides an entry point through which the practitioners can effectively judge the strengths and weakness of their RE processes. When an organisation knows where it is, it can more effectively plan for improvement.

Supporting collaborative engineering design

The complexity of current engineering design demands the collaboration of specialists. Collaboration involves both communication between and coordination among members of a design team. Currently, design collaboration is carried out through the use of schedules, specifications and drawings which only capture the end results of the design process. They fail to record important design information such as the reasoning behind design decisions. In this paper, we describe a tool CADS, that supports collaboration in engineering design. CADS is based on an extension to the Axiomatic Design methodology which not only captures the design elements but also the rationale used to conceive them. CADS serves as a shared database of design information with facilities that support communication and coordination in engineering design.Currently at the Media Laboratory, MIT.     

Design information retrieval: a thesauri-based approach for reuse of informal design information

Information is integral to the engineering design process, and gaining access to design knowledge is critical to effective design decision-making. This paper considers the indexing and retrieval of informal, unstructured information captured from electronic design logbooks. One of the key observations of informal design information is its evolutionary nature over time. While this characteristic makes informal information a rich source for reuse, it also makes it difficult to employ traditional information retrieval (IR) approaches. The work described in this paper is based on a framework developed specifically for the information handling requirements of designers. This manual method for indexing information is adapted to meet the evolutionary nature of design through the development of thesauri for design context. Several approaches to building thesauri are examined, including manual and automated methods. It is found that manual methods provide a high level of IR performance, but also have high overhead requirements. Machine methods, however, may provide a viable, low overhead alternative.