The dimensional analysis conceptual modeling (DACM) framework is a conceptual modeling mechanism for lifecycle systems engineering. Originally developed for military projects, the DACM framework is now available for other applications, too. This powerful approach handles the specifying, discovering, validating, and reusing of building blocks as well as system behavior analysis in early development stages.
The quality of requirements is fundamental in engineering projects. Requirements are usually expressed partly or totally in a natural language (NL) format and come from different documents.Their qualities are difficult to analyze manually, especially when hundreds of thousands of them have to be considered. The assistance of software tools is becoming a necessity. In this article, the goal was to develop a set of metrics supported by NL processing (NLP) methods supporting different types of analysis of requirements and especially the dependencies between requirements.An NLP approach is used to extract requirements from text; to analyze their quality, links, similarities, and contradictions; and to cluster them automatically. The analysis framework includes different combinations of methods such as cosine similarity, singular value decomposition, and Kmeans clustering. One objective is to assess the possible combinations and their impacts on detections to establish optimal metrics. Three case studies exemplify and support the validation of the work. Graphs are used to represent the automatically clustered requirements, as well as similarities and contradictions. A new contradiction analysis process that includes a rules-based approach is proposed. Finally, the combined results are presented as graphs, which unveil the semantic relationships between requirements. Subsection 4.8 compares the results provided by the tool and the results obtained from experts. The proposed methodology and network presentation not only support the understanding of the semantics of the requirements but also help requirements engineers to review the interconnections and consistency of requirements systems and manage traceability. The approach is valuable during the early phases of projects when requirements are evolving dynamically and rapidly. K E Y W O R D S contradictions analysis, network representation, requirements management, similarity Systems Engineering. 2018;21:555-575. c 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 555 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/sys AUTHORS' BIOGRAPHIES FAISAL MOKAMMEL is a doctoral student at Aalto University and work at Selko Oy developing a commercial version of the requirement extractor and analyser tool developed during his doctoral thesis. ERIC COATANÉA is tenured professor at Tampere University of Technology and was the initiator of the requirement extractor and analyser project. JOONAS COATANÉA is developer at Selko Oy. MOKAMMEL ET AL. 575 VLADISLAV NENCHEV is software developer and formal logic expert at Selko Oy. ERIC BLANCO is professor at INP Grenoble. MATTI PIETOLA is tenured professor at Aalto University. How to cite this article: Mokammel F, Coatanéa E, Coatanéa J, Nenchev V, Blanco E, Pietola M. Automatic requirements extraction, analysis, and graph representation using an approach derived from computational linguistics. Systems Engineering. 2018;21:555-575. https://doi.
In engineering design, the needs of stakeholders are often captured and expressed in natural language (NL). While this facilitates such tasks as sharing information with non-specialists, there are several associated problems including ambiguity, incompleteness, understandability, and testability. Traditionally, these issues were managed through tedious procedures such as reading requirements documents and looking for errors, but new approaches are being developed to assist designers in collecting, analysing, and clarifying requirements. The quality of the end-product is strongly related to the clarity of requirements and, thus, requirements should be managed carefully. This paper proposes to combine diverse requirements quality measures found from literature. These metrics are coherently integrated in a single software tool. This paper also proposes a new metric for clustering requirements based on their similarity to increase the quality of requirement model. The proposed methodology is tested on a case study and results show that this tool provides designers with insight on the quality of individual requirements as well as with a holistic assessment of the entire set of requirements.
During a system engineering process there are an important number of tasks that need to be organized, mapped together and recursively considered. The tasks that are mapped together are exchanging different flows of information and material. In this type of iterative processes, significant savings in term of development time can be made by providing a method that is optimizing the amount of feedbacks and iterations to the minimal level simply required for the successful development of the system. Task scheduling in a system engineering process can become extremely complex. Nevertheless it is a crucial step of the early stages of the systems engineering process for timeto-market, cost-efficiency and quality reasons. In this article, the authors are proposing to combine a computational approach (Discrete Differential Evolution) with Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) for minimizing iterations and reducing lead-time development. The present article is contributing to recent research works using Design Structure Matrixes (DSM) and computational methods for visualizing and analyzing systems engineering processes. The paper is proposing a framework integrating a model-based approach and a DSM based analysis of the process architecture to assist system engineers in organizing and scheduling tasks. As a result, this framework allows engineers to automatically populate DSMs generated from MBSE models developed in SysML. A specific stereotype is proposed to represent system development tasks in SysML. The sequencing of the engineering tasks is optimized with the application of a Discrete Differential Evolution algorithm (DDE) taking into account the different constraints. The practical use of the proposed framework is demonstrated on the case study of a mobile robot developed for the Eurobot competition. The article also discusses the possibility to use the current framework to analyze the impact of requirement changes on the scheduling of development tasks.
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