Ontology-driven requirements engineering – a case study of OntoREM in the aerospace context

Abstract

OntoREM is an Ontology-driven Requirements Engineering Methodology (process, methods and tools) that aims to improve the quality of requirements while also reducing the time and cost needed to develop, maintain and re-use requirements. In order to evaluate the potential of such an ontology-driven approach, OntoREM was applied to the aircraft operability (AO) domain and generic AO requirements for the wing design were developed. These requirements were subsequently compared to corresponding AO requirements that were developed for the wing design of two different development contexts for which a traditional requirements process was applied. Similarly, the elapsed process times to develop the requirements were compared, as measured for OntoREM and estimated for the traditional requirements process. The preliminary outcomes of this case study strongly suggest that the application of the OntoREM approach led to better quality requirements in considerably less time and hence at less cost per requirement. Further saving potential exists through increasing automation of OntoREM. In addition, there are several, additional advantages of applying this methodology that, for example, enable the re- use of domain ontologies including requirements in even less time i.e. at lower cost in the future, not to mention the advantages of explicitly capturing domain knowledge. An industrial scale pilot application of OntoREM has been proposed in order to mature the methodology and its underlying IT infrastructure for the anticipated global use in the context of entire aircraft development programmes in order to prepare for full integration into the Airbus Product Development Process (PDP).

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