Toward a better integration of requirements and model‐based specifications
Stephen Pendergast
Systems Engineering Consulting of Complex Radar, Sonar, Navigation and Satellite Comm Systems
sebokwiki.org Transitioning Systems Engineering to a Model-based Discipline
Systems engineers have always leveraged many kinds of models, including functional models to support requirements development, simulation models to analyze the behavior of systems, and other analytical models to analyze various aspects of the system such as reliability, safety, mass properties, power consumption, and cost. However, the discipline still relies heavily on document-based artifacts to capture much of the system specification and design information, such as requirements, interface control documentation, and system architecture design descriptions. This information is often spread across many different documents including text, informal drawings, and spreadsheets. This document-based approach to systems engineering suffers from a lack of precision, inconsistencies from one artifact to another, and difficulties in maintaining and reusing the information.
Toward a better integration of requirements and model‐based specifications
Systems Engineering Pub Date : 2020-10-05 , DOI: 10.1002/sys.21560
Benoît Lebeaupin; Antoine Rauzy
onlinelibrary.wiley.com Toward a better integration of requirements and model‐based specifications
REGULAR PAPER
First published: 05 October 2020
Abstract
As of today, most specifications of technical systems still rely on requirements written in natural language. However, this approach is known to be problem‐prone, due to the inherent ambiguity of natural languages. On the other hand, fully formal or model‐based approaches seem to be out of reach in many practical cases, especially in early design phases of systems.
In this article, we study how to combine in a pragmatic way natural language requirements with models. We propose to keep both formats and to link pieces of text in requirements with elements of models. In other words, corpuses of requirements are managed as hypertexts with links to models. For this approach to be fully efficient, the text of requirements is not free, but relies on controlled natural language techniques leading to a partial structuring of the text.
We show that this makes it possible to design (semi)automatic verifications on requirements and models, which would be impossible with unconstrained natural language. We illustrate here our approach on a small illustrative example and we report results obtained on a full size industrial application.