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Systems Engineering Requirements: A Guided Example
of an Applied Knowledge System
Anabel Fraga and Juan Llorens
Carlos III of Madrid University, Madrid, Spain
Abstract. Knowledge is centric to systems engineering, the knowledge man-
agement process must take into account that a System Knowledge Repository
(SKR) exists as a key element for either quality improvement, traceability sup-
port and, in summary, reuse purposes. Requirements engineering in the Sys-
tems Engineering process is enhanced by using knowledge systems and quality
of requirements enriched as well. The more correct, complete and consistent a
requirement is, the best performance it will have and knowledge systems enable
a more exhaustive and fast quality process. A knowledge management process
is proposed and it is guided by a requirements domain based example.
Keywords. Requirements Engineering, Ontologies, Knowledge, System engi-
neering, Reuse.
1 Introduction
The application of ontology engineering in systems engineering seems to be a very
promising trend [12], [4]. We call it system verification based on Knowledge Man-
agement, and it deals with assisting System Engineers to get a complete and con-
sistent set of requirements (e.g. compliance to regulation, business rules, non-
redundancy of requirements…) by using Ontologies, which represent the domains of
knowledge of an organization. The combination of Requirements Engineering with
Knowledge Management, throughout Information Retrieval from existing sources,
allows the verification process to measure quality of a set of requirements by tracea-
bility, consistency/redundancy, completeness and noise. Information retrieval ena-
bles also to verify the completeness of the ontology using a PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-
Act) cycle of improvement. Requirements engineering is the first step and by tracea-
bility and Ontology based systems, similar assets of any phase of the development
process used in analogous projects could be reused and adapted to a new challenge.
For instance, by using a semantic approach, a requirement can be translated into a
graph by means of NLP (Natural Language Processing) techniques.
In order to build a knowledge repository for managing requirements quality, the
first activity must be to clearly define the typology of requirements that are going to
be covered by the knowledge system, because this typology will affect the require-
ments structure and vocabulary. For example, an organization would be interested in
managing the quality of “performance requirements”. Even if it seems to be simple,
the selection of the kind of requirements to formalize in a knowledge repository is
Fraga A. and Llorens J..
Systems Engineering Requirements: A Guided Example of an Applied Knowledge System.
DOI: 10.5220/0005177700190030
In Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Software Knowledge (SKY-2014), pages 19-30
ISBN: 978-989-758-051-2
Copyright
c
2014 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)