REPRESENTATION AND MANAGEMENT OF REQUIREMENTS - THE RAPID-WS PROJECT

RAPID-WS (Requirements Process in Design for Weapon Systems) is an adv anced research and development project conducted by the Air Force Arms trong Laboratory, Logistics Research Division, RAPID-WS prototypes and demonstrates decision support system tools and supporting methodologi es to improve requirements determination and analysis in a concurrent collaborative environment. In this paper, we concentrate on our approa ch to the semi-formal representation and capture of requirements. We a void common assumptions that restrict the subject domain to informatio n processing systems. We also attempt to build a representation that d oes not force the requirements analyst to do anything that looks like programming in a formal language. We see a requirements document as a set oi constraints imposed on the attributes and relations (properties ) of domain entities relevant to the subject artifact throughout the a rtifact's lifecycle. While earlier research deals only with attribute requirements and views relations as specified a priori, we define both relations and attributes only via requirements. We found that require ments specified in typical requirements documents can be classified in to a relatively small set of formal types and modalities. Requirements can be decomposed into simple requirement statements, and most of the simple requirement statements have the same generalized structure. Ba sed on these findings, we propose a frame-based Requirements Specifica tion Language (RSL) which is semi-formal in the sense that it contains elements (textual descriptions) which require human interpretation.