3.6.2 Next Generation Requirements Engineering

Abstract

Abstract. Establishing and managing a "good" set of requirements is one of the critical success factors for any space system project, and for the development of any complex product in general. The NextGenRE project sponsored by the European Space Agency has developed an innovative approach featuring the use of semantic wiki technology to enable users to specify structured, semantically-rich requirements associated with canonical system designs in OMG SysML. Reuse of requirements through templates is supported, as well as semantic reasoning to check properties such as consistency and coherence among requirements. The approach is entirely model-based, allowing tight integration of the requirements engineering and design processes and opening the way to the application of model checking and simulation techniques. The new approach is being validated alongside an existing space project. Current Requirements Engineering PracticeIt has often been said, with only slight exaggeration, that systems engineering is mostly about eliciting requirements and determining feasibility. Requirements engineering is particularly crucial in complex systems developments such as space systems, which need multidisciplinary concurrent engineering of many different subsystems in domains ranging from electronics to biology. The Next Generation Requirements Engineering (NextGenRE) project sponsored by the European Space Agency has developed an approach to introducing incremental improvements in requirements engineering as it is practiced today toward the best practices of tomorrow. It is important to distinguish between:Requirements engineering, which comprises the elicitation, formulation, analysis, derivation and refinement of requirements, as well as the identification and assignment of verification and validation approaches. Requirements engineering is usually performed in an iterative process with conceptual / preliminary design 461

Semantic Modeling and Analysis of Natural Language System Requirements

“…The inner structure of requirement specifications is addressed briefly and mainly outsourced to SysML. According to [82], the adaptation of the SysML requirements concept is considered as a weakness, therefore they propose to combine the JPL mission concepts with a more detailed requirement semantics model.…”

Requirements document relations

“…As described in Sect. 4.2, this is not limited to classical document formats, but also interactive document like views, e.g., in requirements engineering tools or wikis [96]. Within the T-Reqs conceptual model, documents are regarded as views on (sets of) requirements.…”

Opportunities for software reuse in an uncertain world: From past to emerging trends

“…The process calls for a systematic search for historical precedents that represent potential solutions to partial aspects of an innovation problem, followed by their creative combination to arrive at a full solution. The possibility of creating a repository of historical precedents for search and retrieval has been investigated, whereby as a first step, the utilization of semantic Wiki technology is postulated. The process poses several major research challenges: the semantic fuzziness of the representation of the precedents, the fact that the insight contained within a precedent may change according to the specific innovation problem, and the difficulty of formulating search and retrieval queries.…”