Statement Of Requirements Research Articles

The Introduction of Rail Transport in the Prussian Rhine Province: A Transaction Cost Economic History

This paper examines the usefulness of Coasian Transaction Cost Economics for describing the governance outcomes for semi-public markets, i.e. markets where some government involvement is indispensable, and where the government transacts with private parties, or provides the service in-house. Given the high degree of path dependence in such governance choices, this paper examines the moment of technological innovation, where outcomes are expected to be the least path dependent. To be precise, the case under consideration is the first introduction of rail transport in Germany, in the Ruhe area. This case study is confronted with a bare minimum transaction cost model, i.e. a statement of the minimum requirements that need to be present in order to make a transaction cost model a viable source of understanding.

Going global : Developing globally harmonised software specifications for records

The need for good e-recordkeeping systems has been recognized since the 1990s. The production of international standards on which to base such systems has been a notable achievement; however it has been difficult for software vendors to produce one internationally-compliant product. On the initiative of the National Archives of Australia, a team drawn from the ICA and the Australasian Digital Recordkeeping Initiative developed a single, globally-harmonised statement of requirements that could be used as the basis for developing or revising jurisdiction-specific requirements. A main objective was to produce a statement of requirements fit for the purposes and realities of less wealthy countries. The three main ‘modules’ are (1) an overview document and statement of principles; (2) high-level requirements and guidelines for ERMS software; and (3) guidelines and requirements for managing records in business systems. This last allows organizations to manage records within existing business systems rather than...

An Analysis of the Spectral Transform Operations in Climate and Weather Models

The spectral transform method used in climate and weather models is known to be computationally intensive. Typically accounting for more than 90% of the execution time of a serial model, it is poised to benefit from computational parallelism. Since dimensionally global transforms impact parallel performance, it is important to establish the realizable parallel efficiency of the spectral transform. To this end, this paper quantitatively characterizes the parallel characteristics of the spectral transform within an atmospheric modeling context. It comprehensively characterizes and catalogs a baseline of operations required for the spectral transform. While previous investigations of the spectral transform method have offered highly idealized analyses that are abstract and simplified in terms of orders of computational magnitude, this research provides a detailed model of the computational complexity of the spectral transform, validated by empirical results. From this validated quantitative analysis, an operational closed-form expression characterizes spectral transform performance in terms of general processor parameters and atmospheric data dimensions. These generalized statements of the computational requirements for the spectral transform can serve as a basis for exploiting parallelism.

Integrating discrete event and lighting simulation for analyzing construction work zones lighting plans

Nighttime construction is being widely adopted in the United States as a way to mitigate the impact of construction operations on the traveling public. Although a number of states have developed standard specifications for nighttime lighting, these standards are usually in the form of generic requirement statements that only specify minimum illuminance levels. The lighting standards do not include specific ways to achieve this illuminance level, such as lighting arrangements and configurations for various work zone plans and construction operations. This leaves confusion between the traffic engineers and the contractors and does not guarantee consistency in those plans, thus affecting productivity and safety. Therefore there is a need to develop a tool that can help contractors and engineers to design and implement lighting plans for nighttime construction. The main objective of this paper is to present a new lighting design framework that utilizes three dimensional lighting analysis and construction operation simulation to study and model lighting conditions of a construction site. A prototype software tool called NiteLite that implements the proposed framework was developed and is presented here. Various lighting plans can be studied using the software to provide for typical applications including lighting fixture's locations, fixture photometric web, mounting height, angle, and fixture type. The results from the developed software tool were validated through comparisons with previous research conducted using field measurements. It has been shown that NiteLite can provide accurate lighting analysis, as well as having the ability to model a wider range of conditions and work zone configurations and considering new lighting criteria such as Glare Rating. Furthermore, NiteLite allows users to study the dynamic nature of lighting in construction sites by allowing the animation of expected equipment and traffic patterns and thus studying the impact of lighting conditions on glare in the construction site.

Advanced product planning: a comprehensive process for systemic definition of new product requirements

This paper reports results of research into the definition of requirements for new consumer products––specifically, electro-mechanical products. The research dealt with the derivation of design requirements that are demonstrably aligned with stakeholder needs. The paper describes a comprehensive process that can enable product development teams to deal with statements of product requirements, as originally collected through market research activities, in a systematic and traceable manner from the early, fuzzy front end, stages of the design process. The process described has been based on principles of systems engineering. A case study from its application and evaluation drawn from the power sector is described in this paper. The case study demonstrates how the process can significantly improve product quality planning practices through revision of captured product requirements, analysis of stakeholder requirements and derivation of design requirements. The paper discusses benefits and issues from the use of the process by product development teams, and identifies areas for further research. Finally, the conclusions drawn from the reported research are presented.

Requirements modelling and formal analysis using graph operations

The increasing complexity of enterprise systems requires a more advanced analysis of the representation of services expected than is currently possible. Consequently, the specification stage, which could be facilitated by formal verification, becomes very important to the system life-cycle. This paper presents a formal modelling approach, which may be used in order to better represent the reality of the system and to verify the awaited or existing system's properties, taking into account the environmental characteristics. For that, we firstly propose a formalization process based upon properties specification, and secondly we use Conceptual Graphs operations to develop reasoning mechanisms of verifying requirements statements. The graphic visualization of these reasoning enables us to correctly capture the system specifications by making it easier to determine if desired properties hold. It is applied to the field of Enterprise modelling.

2.1.1 Feelings and Physics: Emotional, Psychological, and Other Soft Human Requirements, by Model‐Based Systems Engineering

AbstractTraditionally, engineering encourages requirements statements that are objective, testable, quantitative, atomic descriptions of system technical behavior. But what about “soft” requirements? When products deliver psychologically or emotionally‐based human experiences, subjective descriptions may frustrate engineers. This challenge is important for products appealing to senses of style, enjoyment, fulfillment, stimulation, power, safety, awareness, comfort, or similar emotional or psychological factors. Automobiles, buildings, consumer products, packaging, graphic user interfaces, airline passenger compartments and flight decks, and hospital equipment provide typical examples. This paper shows how Model‐Based Systems Engineering helps solve three related problems: (1) integrating models of “soft” human experience with hard technical product requirements; (2) describing how to score traditional “hard” technology products in terms of “fuzzier” business and competitive marketplace issues; and (3) coordinating marketing communication and promotion with the design process. The resulting framework integrates the diverse perspectives of engineers, stylists, industrial designers, human factors experts, and marketing professionals.

Handling non-canonical software requirements based on Annotated Predicate Calculus

Eliciting requirements for a proposed system inevitably involves the problem of handling undesirable information about customer's needs, including inconsistency, vagueness, redundancy, or incompleteness. We term the requirements statements involved in the undesirable information non-canonical software requirements. In this paper, we propose an approach to handling non-canonical software requirements based on Annotated Predicate Calculus (APC). Informally, by defining a special belief lattice appropriate for representing the stakeholder's belief in requirements statements, we construct a new form of APC to formalize requirements specifications. We then show how the APC can be employed to characterize non-canonical requirements. Finally, we show how the approach can be used to handle non-canonical requirements through a case study.

Deriving specifications from requirements through problem reduction

Software problems – problems whose solution is software-intensive – come in many forms. Given that software and computers are deeply embedded in society, one general characteristic of software problems is that their early requirements are expressed ‘deep into the world’, that is, in terms that end-users and other stake-holders would recognise and understand. The developer is left with the difficult task of interpreting such requirements closer to the software solution.Problem reduction is proposed as a systematic transformation for deriving specifications from requirements in the context of problem-oriented analysis. It allows the context of a problem to be simplified while re-expressing the requirement. It was applied in the context of Problem Frames and argued that it can be used as a systematic way of deriving specification statements from requirement statements via a sequence of transformed problems. The approach is illustrated in two examples.

Requirements Engineering Tasks.

Many managers and others who are not professional requirements engineers tend to greatly over-simplify requirements engineering (RE). Based on their observations that requirements specifications primarily contain narrative English textual statements of individual requirements and that all members of the engineering team are reasonably literate, there is a common myth that practically anyone with little or no specialized training or expertise can be a requirements engineer. After all, what is there to do but ask a few stakeholders what they want (requirements elicitation), study the resulting requirements to make sure they are understood (requirements analysis), write the requirements down in a document (requirements specification), and then ask the customer if they’re right (requirements validation). Just give the team a short class in use case modeling, and they are ready to go. Unfortunately, the preceding is a misleading, if much too prevalent, myth. While these four RE tasks (not sequential phases!) are commonly performed with varying degrees of completeness, rigor, and success on most projects, a list of tasks containing only these four is far from complete. The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief

Generating requirements from systems models using patterns: a case study

Academic research has produced many model-based specification and analysis techniques, however, most organisations continue to document requirements as textual statements. To help bridge this gap between academic research and requirements practice, this paper reports an extension to the RESCUE process in which patterns for generating requirements statements from i* system models were manually applied to i* models developed for a complex air traffic control system. The paper reports the results of this application and describes them with examples, the benefits of the approach to the project, and ongoing research to implement these patterns in the REDEPEND modelling tool to make requirements engineers more productive. We review similar work on requirements modelling and expression, and compare our work to it to demonstrate the proposed advance in the state of the art. Finally the paper discusses future uses of requirements generation from model patterns in RESCUE.

UPEX

The failure of projects is often based on difficulties in the direct and indirect communication between developer and customer teams. For the customer it is hard to understand the frequently used terms, process models, and technological concepts. Developers have a hard time to understand domain specific processes and structures, and exhibit a tendency to abstract concrete examples to higher level constructs. This makes it difficult for the customer team to understand the developing architecture and processes, and to match their needs and intentions, during evaluation phases, to seemingly unrelated generalised drawings and specifications. This set of problems is especially hard to avoid during the development of dynamic, distributed systems with multiple nodes and possibly asynchronous behaviour.Our research tries to mediate in this conflict by providing a customer-friendly reference model as basis of communication in early development phases. This model presents and simulates the dynamic aspects of (distributed) systems without immediate abstraction from examples and allows for a stepwise generalisation and evaluation with help of the customer team. In its final version the reference model will serve as a requirements statement for the professional developer.

11.2.1 Requirements Statements Are Transfer Functions: An Insight from Model‐Based Systems Engineering

AbstractTraditional systems engineering pays attention to careful composition of prose requirements statements. Even so, prose appears less than what is needed to advance the art of systems engineering into a theoretically‐based engineering discipline comparable to Electrical, Mechanical, or Chemical Engineering. Ask three people to read a set of prose requirements statements, and a universal experience is that there will be three different impressions of their meaning. The rise of Model‐Based Systems Engineering might suggest the demise of prose requirements, but we argue otherwise. This paper shows how prose requirements can be productively embedded in and a valued formal part of requirements models. This leads to the practice‐impacting insight that requirements statements can be non‐linear extensions of linear transfer functions, shows how their ambiguity can be further reduced using ordinary language, how their completeness or overlap more easily audited, and how they can be “understood” more completely by engineering tools.

A method for performance briefing at the project inception stage

PurposeThe purpose of this article is to create a strategically positioned client performance brief with a clear and workable statement of the project requirements specified by a representative group of stakeholders.Design/methodology/approachThe application describes the relocation of a library with community facilities with a local council. This action research study of the project inception stages used the process of strategic needs analysis (SNA). This approach uses a workshop setting involving stakeholders in identifying a range of strategic options for the project problem. The development of a range of realistic options was aided by the use of a problem‐ structuring computer program, Situation Structuring. Individual workshop participants then expressed their preferences for the final options using a second software package (Strategizer) and after a short period for analysis the results were presented to a second workshop for discussion. The performance brief was then prepared to reflect stakeholders' and the workshop's preferences.FindingsThe process involved is described with the development and selection of organizational strategic options with the council stakeholders. The creation and identification of user performance indicators to guide the design development process is illustrated and a sample from the final performance brief is provided. The project is nearing completion and the local Council considers the process has been a success.Research limitations/implicationsThe process described has been developed over six studies in varying client environments in Australia. Further studies are needed in client organisations with a rolling program of capital works to test the robustness of the approach described.Practical implicationsThis work can assist the facilities manager to play an important role in the development of the initial performance‐based brief during the project inception stage that can assist clients and guide the design team.Originality/valueEstablishing client needs during the formative stages of a project (before design commences) is becoming an increasingly important role for the facilities manager. This work presents a description of a process that provides the means for clients and facilities managers to ensure that their strategic needs are met within the defined project.

Strategic benefits of software test management: a case study

Abstract In some sections of the IT community, the principal form of software testing undertaken is functional testing, whereby, the functions that the software is supposed to perform are identified purely from the statement of requirements and these functions are then tested by means of representative test cases. It is argued in this case study that, whilst this provides a good foundation for testing, it can potentially leave many structural aspects of a program untested. What is advocated here is that test tools should be used to monitor structural coverage during functional testing and that additional test cases should then be devised to ensure that coverage is maximized. Although functional testing and structural testing might be seen as competitive techniques, in combination together they complement each other, forming a software testing strategy more powerful than either technique on its own.

An Approach to Developing a Performance Brief at the Project Inception Stage

The project inception stage has been the focus of intense research activity in design, project management and facilities management for a number of years. The need to establish the project parameters and performance requirements has been an imperative in many organizations, and facilities managers have been leaders in this process. Pre-design processes and activities are being instituted that work through the client's strategic and organizational issues, needs and requirements before the design team is involved. The participation of stakeholders in pre-design workshops is a common feature of these project inception approaches. These approaches prepare a clear and workable statement of the project requirements in performance terms that the client and user groups have committed themselves to. This strategic brief (or definition of the business case of the organization) can then provide a sound basis for the documentation of the needs and the development of the design. One approach to these early stages of the project is strategic needs analysis. This study describes the use of strategic needs analysis in a community library project where stakeholders from the client organization were involved in workshops to discuss, propose and identify strategic options for the library. Two computer programs assisted in this application—Situation Structuring and Strategizer. In the former, a problem-structuring approach was used to categorize performance indicators that were grouped into the final set of options. Strategizer is a dedicated interactive decision-making program that assists individual stakeholders in ranking the chosen options. The identification of performance indicators established by the stakeholders during the strategic needs analysis is an important part of the project inception process and these performance indicators formed the basis of the final performance brief, part of which is illustrated in this paper.

Implementing building energy codes in Hong Kong: energy savings, environmental impacts and cost

A significant proportion of the total energy produced in Hong Kong is consumed by the building stocks, which account for nearly half of the total energy consumption. Due to expanding economy and substantial improvement in living standards over the past decade, the demand of electricity generation has remarkably increased. This rising trend of energy use will inevitably lead to increasing environmental problems. In this respect, a comprehensive set of codes of practice for energy efficiency in building services installation were drawn up by Energy Efficiency Office (EEO) in 1998 in Hong Kong. The codes represent a performance-based approach, which set maximum allowable energy consumption levels for various installations with statements of requirements and evaluation methods. This work evaluates the codes and their improvements on our environment by considering the energy saving, reduction of fuel use and pollutants emission from the power plants if the building energy code programmes become statutory. A group of pilot buildings selected from the commercial sector is used in an evaluation study. In particular, the potential reduction of greenhouse gases emission to the environment has been predicted for the justification of the usefulness of the energy codes. It is found that the application of building energy codes on these buildings has achieved a substantial reduction of energy consumption and an accompanied reduction of greenhouse gas emission. A simple benefit–cost analysis is also performed to evaluate the economics behind the codes and the results fully justify its enactment.

Stakeholder Management during Project Inception: Strategic Needs Analysis

The project inception stage has been the focus of intense research activity for a number of years. The need to establish the project parameters and performance requirements has been an imperative in many organizations. Predesign processes and activities are being instituted that work through client strategic and organizational issues, needs, and requirements before the design team is involved. The participation of stakeholders in predesign workshops is a common feature of these project inception approaches. These approaches prepare a clear and workable statement of the project requirements in performance terms that the client group has agreed and committed itself to. This document can then provide a sound basis for the development of the design. One approach to these early stages of the project is strategic needs analysis. This approach uses a workshop setting to focus stakeholder involvement in proposing and identifying a range of strategic options for the proposed project. A case study of strategic needs analysis involving university faculty relocation to a new site is presented. The developments of organizational strategic options are described with the development of user performance indicators to guide the design development process.

Combination method of rough set and genetic programming

A methodology for using rough set for preference modeling in decision problem is presented in this paper; where we will introduce a new approach for deriving knowledge rules from database based on rough set combined with genetic programming. Genetic programming belongs to the most new techniques in applications of artificial intelligence. Rough set theory, which emerged about 20 years back, is nowadays a rapidly developing branch of artificial intelligence and soft computing. At the first glance, the two methodologies that we discuss are not in common. Rough set construct is the representation of knowledge in terms of attributes, semantic decision rules, etc. On the contrary, genetic programming attempts to automatically create computer programs from a high‐level statement of the problem requirements. But, in spite of these differences, it is interesting to try to incorporate both the approaches into a combined system. The challenge is to obtain as much as possible from this association.

Rule-based generation of requirements traceability relations

The support for traceability between requirement specifications has been recognised as an important task in the development life cycle of software systems. In this paper, we present a rule-based approach to support the automatic generation of traceability relations between documents which specify requirement statements and use cases (expressed in structured forms of natural language), and analysis object models for software systems. The generation of such relations is based on traceability rules of two different types. More specifically, we use requirement-to-object-model rules to trace the requirements and use case specification documents to an analysis object model, and inter-requirements traceability rules to trace requirement and use case specification documents to each other. By deploying such rules, our approach can generate four different types of traceability relations. To implement and demonstrate our approach, we have implemented a traceability prototype system. This system assumes requirement and use case specification documents and analysis object models represented in XML. It also uses traceability rules which are represented in an XML-based rule mark-up language that we have developed for this purpose. This XML-based representation framework makes it easier to deploy our prototype in settings characterised by the use of heterogeneous software engineering and requirements management tools. The developed prototype has been used in a series of experiments that we have conducted to evaluate our approach. The results of these experiments have provided encouraging initial evidence about the plausibility of our approach and are discussed in the paper.