Requirement Modeling Systems for Mechanical Design: A Systematic Method for Evaluating Requirement Management Tools and Languages

Requirements engineering has received increased attention in mechanical design as systems have become increasingly complex. Requirements engineering involves several key activities including eliciting, modeling, and analyzing requirements. Problems with requirements engineering include addressing requirements generated from multiple design perspectives, communicating requirements across the design team, and understanding how requirements affect other product design information. Several requirement management tools have been developed to address these issues. However, evaluating the capabilities of current and next generation tools has not been systematically addressed. In this paper, a systematic approach and example problem are developed to evaluate the capability of modern requirements management tools. First, eight capabilities are identified from existing literature and industry design problems. Next, a baseline example problem is developed and implemented in two requirement management tools, namely IBM DOORS and NoMagic MagicDraw+SysML. The evaluation results show that each software tool addresses seven of the eight capabilities to a varying degree, with the exception of input validation of an individual requirement. Further, SysML offers a robust and descriptive set of relationships for modeling complex engineering systems that are useful for requirements analysis. Finally, the research is not intended to be a complete survey of all requirements management tools, but rather to provide a repeatable and systematic method for evaluating and developing requirements management tools.