Model based requirements management for the space mission design framework

Abstract

Requirements engineering plays an important role both in software and systems engineering. It is the process of defining, documenting, and maintaining requirements. Requirements traceability is a branch of requirements engineering, which establishes relationships between requirements and design artifacts, implementation artifacts, and test cases. Traceability provides several benefits both in software and systems engineering, one of them is to provide change impact analysis. When a particular requirement changes, it is implied that the artifacts related with the requirement should also change. In this thesis, we provide a new methodology for requirements management and traceability. Although the methodology is applicable for different systems engineering domains, space mission requirements and spacecraft models are the main focus of this thesis. The methodology consists of three parts. In the first part, we cover traceability between requirements and model artifacts. Unlike existing traceability approaches, our methodology provides automatic validation. In the second part of the methodology, we introduce modeling on the basis of requirements. The last part of the methodology covers requirements-based artifact reuse. Besides our theoretical contribution, we provide a prototype tool implementation which includes the features of the methodology. In our evaluation, we demonstrate our contribution by integrating our tool with Virtual Satellite, a spacecraft modeling software developed by German Aerospace Center (DLR).