A Requirements Management System based on an Optimization Model of the Design Process

Abstract

In this paper, the engineering design process is modeled as an optimization problem over the system design space, where the goals, desired outcomes, and trade-off preferences of the customer define measurable objective functions. In this formulation, customer requirements become constraints that define the feasible region of all potential system designs. This paper proposes an implementation of a requirement management process that is based on the aforementioned reformulation of the design process. The ultimate goals of such a reformulation are to provide a way of viewing the requirements that better communicates customer wishes to the design team, to increase customer participation in the system definition process, improve adherence to customer wishes when conflicts and trade-off situations arise, and to allow for integration of decision making techniques and rationales with the requirements discovery and management processes. After describing the proposed requirements management model, this paper describes some potential methods of solving non-linear optimization problems that may be applied to this formulation of the design process, and under what conditions those methods apply. Further case studies are suggested to evaluate this methodology's performance against traditional requirements management systems in relation to the metrics described above.