Requirement-driven design: assistance for information traceability in design computing

Abstract

Requirement traceability is the commonly used term to refer to the management of the relationships that exist between design requirements and design solutions, throughout the design life-cycle. Current design computing practice makes only limited use of these relationships. Most of the current methods of computational requirement traceability rely on sequential or ad hoc processes. Such processes force the designers to either juggle the requirement information among many applications, or customize generic applications, such as databases or spreadsheets, to fit their needs. The resulting applications are not only inefficient in their use of requirement information, but also create problems in change management, consistency checking, and design compliance verification. I believe, augmenting architectural design computing environments with requirement traceability functionalities offers opportunities to overcome these drawbacks. This research seeks to answer the following questions: (1) how can requirement traceability be integrated with computer-aided design at a process level; (2) how can a requirement traceability capability be created within computer-aided architectural design; and (3) how can the potential impact of requirement traceability be measured. In addressing the research questions, a computational, hybrid assistance framework for the requirement management process, CHARM in short, is presented. The process captures activities both in requirement specification and design exploration phases to support traceability. Based on the observations in CHARM, a prototype application called DesignTrack, was developed. The capabilities of DesignTrack were evaluated by applying them to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standard requirements. This evaluation provides evidence of the practicality and usefulness of CHARM and DesignTrack. This research advances design computing by highlighting the requirement-driven design thinking process and traceability enabled computer-aided design support. CHARM introduces requirement-driven design thinking into computer-aided design. It introduces information traceability as a design task which assists designers to manage information change. The computational structures for requirement traceability utilize relationships between requirements and designs. DesignTrack as a prototype introduces an integrated design development environment for requirement specification and form exploration in the same design session. This effort provides a navigation environment for complex design information spaces.