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

“…This mentioned approach extends OWL with closed world constraints to check the completeness of requirements model against well established metrics such a ISO/IEC 9126. OntoREM [3] is an ontology-driven requirements engineering methodology, which introduced in order to improve requirements quality while reducing the efforts (i.e. development and maintenance) for requirements reuse.…”

“…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].…”

Applying OntoREM to a Space Mission: Developing Requirements for the MASCOT Lander

“…In the field of Systems Engineering, in particular in the discipline of Requirements Engineering, ontology-driven approaches have been developed that seem to enable improved quality of requirements in terms of correctness, completeness and consistency, while helping to realise tremendous saving potentials in terms of process times and costs [1,2]. In the field of Systems Engineering, in particular in the discipline of Requirements Engineering, ontology-driven approaches have been developed that seem to enable improved quality of requirements in terms of correctness, completeness and consistency, while helping to realise tremendous saving potentials in terms of process times and costs [1,2].…”