Elicitation, Computational Representation, and Analysis of Mission and System Requirements

Strategies for evaluating the impact of mission requirements on the design of mission-specific vehicles are needed to enable project managers to assess potential benefits and associated costs of changes in requirements. Top-level requirements that cause significant cascaded difficulties on lower-level requirements should be identified and presented to decision-makers. This paper aims to introduce formal methods and computational tools to enable the analysis and allocation of mission requirements. Initial results for three interrelated research problems are discussed: (1) understanding the current practices of interrelationships between requirements. the requirements elicitation and change management processes using a case study approach; (2) requirement elicitation using gamification strategies; and (3) computational representation of the technical requirements and identification The case study approach involves interviewing the stakeholders that participate in the requirements generation process to collect data on the current practices of requirements elicitation. Systematic requirements generation strategies, change management processes, limitations, and areas for improvement are the outcomes of this study. A gamification strategy is also deployed to study requirements elicitation and change management processes by incentivizing the users based on their performance on a set of metrics. Two surveys, one with and the other without gamification, are designed to study the impact of gamification methods on requirements elicitation. Lastly, text analytics tools are developed to extract requirements from textual descriptions and identify their inter-relationships to be stored in the requirement graph representation.