Towards systems requirements interoperability in transdisciplinary engineering
Résumé
The Systems Engineering (SE) is an approach for designing complex systems in a multidisciplinary universe (Sebok, 2012), based on concepts from the systemic paradigm and promoting languages, methods, and standardized processes (ISO 15288). It aims at consolidating, identifying, and formalizing new methods and frameworks that support engineering phases in a better consistent way. Requirements engineering is one of the main step in SE processes. The current research aims at focusing on the open issue related to the formalization of systems requirements for their verification, ensuring the coherence of the whole set of requirements in each contextual engineering domain and their validation against the initial stakeholders’ needs. Any engineering system begins with a phase whose initial objective is to translate needs into functional and non-functional requirements. This is the entry point for the process of producing a specification analysis of an end-product, which validates solutions that meet an initial definition. However, this specification of the system involves a set of distributed heterogeneous knowledge and expertise. This then results in a semantic gap between the users’ needs originally identified and the requirements really taken into account. It is therefore necessary to extract the tacit knowledge embedded in the definition of requirements for understanding and assimilating the real needs related to the studied system. Moreover, requirements coming from different domains are generally linked by non-formalised traceability relationships. It is even difficult to trace any change in their definition and their impact to the whole set of specifications. We will discuss and propose an approach for systems requirement engineering based on a domain ontology together with a notification-based approach for ensuring the effective coherence and understanding of these requirements throughout the life cycle of any complex transdisciplinary system.