Framework for requirements-driven system design automation

In this thesis, a framework for improving model-driven system design productivity with Requirements-Driven Design Automation (RDDA) is presented. The key to the proposed approach is to close the semantic gap between requirements, components and architecture by using compatible semantic models for describing product requirements and component capabilities, including constraints. An ontology-based representation language is designed that spans requirements for the application domain, the software design domain and the component domain. Design automation is supported for architecture development by machine-based mapping of desired product/subsystem features and capabilities to library components and by synthesis and maintenance of Systems Modeling Language (SysML) design structure diagrams. The RDDA framework uses standards-based semantic web technologies and can be integrated with exiting modeling tools. Requirements specification is a major component of the system development cycle. Mistakes and omissions in requirements documents lead to ambiguous or wrong interpretation by engineers, causing errors that trickle down in design and implementation with consequences on the overall development cost. We describe a methodology for requirements specification that aims to alleviate the above issues and that produces models for functional requirements that can be automatically validated for completeness and consistency. The RDDA framework uses an ontology-based language for semantic description of functional product requirements, SysML structure diagrams, component constraints, and Quality of Service. The front-end method for requirements specification is the SysML editor in Rhapsody. A requirements model in Web Ontology Language (OWL) is converted from SysML to Extensible Markup Language Metadata Interchange (XMI) representation.