A scenario-based approach for requirements management in engineering design

Abstract

In engineering design, capturing customers' requirements exactly and transforming them into design specifications are vital to designing a quality product. However, the expressions of customer requirements are normally imprecise and ambiguous due to their linguistic origins. There is still a lack of a systematic approach for elaborating these requirements and transforming them from informal to formal. Therefore, this article provides a scenario-based, systematic approach for requirements management in engineering design. The requirements management process is conceptualized as a three-phase model, and scenarios are integrated into this model for elaborating and formally representing the requirements. A case study of a soy milk maker design is also provided to demonstrate the proposed approach.

Towards Purpose to Function Transition: A systematic approach

“…The general creation process is illustrated in Figure 1. Figure 2 illustrates a formal modeling of artifact scenarios proposed in the authors' previous work (Liu et al, 2012). The left part of this figure is the general schema of scenarios, A (P a1 , P a2 , P a3 …) and B (P b1 , P b2 , P b3 …) refer to the Actors and a set of their properties; R 1 {A(P ai ), B(P bj ),… } indicates different relationships among Actors; C(A) and C(B) refer to some specific constraints associate with the Actors.…”

“…The realization of scenario reformulation/formalization can be diverse, for instance, the descriptive logic language (Ahmed, 2007;Liu, 2010), the graphic ontology (Sowa, 2000), or even a combination of a formal language with natural language (a semi-formal form). The authors had provided a first-order logic based scenario representation for design requirements management in their previous work (Liu et al, 2012).…”

“…As mentioned before, the formal languages used for scenario representation are not limited to one kind. The first-order logic is employed here, and more details about formalization of scenario based on this language can be found in the authors' previous work (Liu et al, 2012).…”

Customer requirement modeling and mapping of numerical control machine

“…Li et al 9 used three types of least squares modeling to obtain CR satisfaction and diverse customer preference requirement. Liu et al 10 proposed a scenario-based systematic approach for requirements management in engineering design. Violante et al 11 incorporated user-centered design principles into the customization process of requirement management tool.…”

Collective understanding of system behavior : incorporating simulations in conceptual systems design

“…Finally, research on using formal models when specifying requirements to avoid ambiguity has resulted in a large body of work. Examples are [Braun et al, 2010] in which a guideline and a tool for requirements specification, REMsES is introduced, or [Liu et al, 2012] in which requirements are captured using a scenario-based approach. Interesting research results can be found in [Sikora et al, 2011], which among others states that requirements models should support specification of requirements across different abstraction levels.…”