7.4.3 Ontology‐driven Requirements Engineering —A case study of OntoREM in the aerospace context

Abstract

OntoREM is an Ontology‐driven Requirements Engineering Methodology (process, methods and tools) that aims to improve the quality of requirements while also reducing the time and cost needed to develop, maintain and re‐use requirements. In order to evaluate the potential of such an ontology‐driven approach, OntoREM was applied to the aircraft operability (AO) domain and generic AO requirements for the wing design were developed. These requirements were subsequently compared to corresponding AO requirements that were developed for the wing design of two different development contexts for which a traditional requirements process was applied. Similarly, the elapsed process times to develop the requirements were compared, as measured for OntoREM and estimated for the traditional requirements process. The preliminary outcomes of this case study strongly suggest that the application of the OntoREM approach led to better quality requirements in considerably less time and hence at less cost per requirement. Further saving potential exists through increasing automation of OntoREM. In addition, there are several, additional advantages of applying this methodology that, for example, enable the reuse of domain ontologies including requirements in even less time i.e. at lower cost in the future, not to mention the advantages of explicitly capturing domain knowledge. An industrial scale pilot application of OntoREM has been proposed in order to mature the methodology and its underlying IT infrastructure for the anticipated global use in the context of entire aircraft development programmes in order to prepare for full integration into the Airbus Product Development Process (PDP).

Ontology-Based Software Requirements Reuse: Case Study in Fire Control Software Product Line Domain

“…Although enabling requirements reuse have an overall affect in the performance of a product line [26], there is not much research on the subject until recently [6], thus systematic requirements reuse solution domain is not mature enough, which results in the proposed solutions to be usually restricted to small-scale academic examples and untested in terms of industrial or commercial capacity [5]. Existing research on requirements reuse indicates that RE is a highly knowledge intensive process [3], [15], [6] thus knowledge based solutions become increasingly popular [15]. For example potential uses of ontologies are listed in [15] as: (i) representation of requirements model, (ii) domain knowledge acquisition, and (iii) representation of domain knowledge.…”

“…This knowledge constitutes a base for the other phases of software development namely; design, implementation and test. In SPL context, Requirements Engineering (RE) processes have two goals: to define and manage requirements within the product line and to configure requirements for single products [2] but RE process usually takes longer than planned and is more costly than originally budgeted for [3]. This nature of RE process often leads to immature and low quality requirements which are highly error prone [3], [4] and dynamic and changing nature of requirements have catastrophic effects on the following phases of software lifecycle.…”

“…In SPL context, Requirements Engineering (RE) processes have two goals: to define and manage requirements within the product line and to configure requirements for single products [2] but RE process usually takes longer than planned and is more costly than originally budgeted for [3]. This nature of RE process often leads to immature and low quality requirements which are highly error prone [3], [4] and dynamic and changing nature of requirements have catastrophic effects on the following phases of software lifecycle. Instead of performing RE process from scratch for each project, having stored reusable requirements elements in a repository might highly improve the development time, cost and quality of the resultant products, which is a promoted idea in SPL development [4].…”

Development of OntEIR Framework to Support BIM Clients in Construction

“…Ontology and requirements engineering studies are not evident in construction, and more precisely in EIR, but there are researches on requirements specifications and requirement engineering in other fields such as systems engineering, for what it offers that field in improving the qualities of requirements, terms of correctness, completeness, and consistency, which will have great effects in saving time and cost (Kossmann et al, 2008;Kossmann and Odeh 2010).…”

“…OntoREM was initially developed to capture and manage reference knowledge and concepts in the domain of RE, which will result in the development of high quality requirements for any specific application domains (Kossmann and Odeh, 2010). OntoREM (Ontology-Driven Requirements Engineering Methodology) is the product of a joint project between the University of the West of England and Airbus.…”