Development and Implementation of an MBSE Requirement Verification Framework in the System Design Process

Abstract

Requirement management is an important part of the design process. A perfectly feasible design can be useless if it does not meet the requirements imposed on the design. With the upcoming automation in the design process, requirement management can become even more complicated. How are requirements driving the design and how are these requirements verified? The requirement “trace” to the design can be unclear, which is the connection between the requirement and where the requirement is impacting the design. It is desired to know this as early in the design process as possible, since a design change due to a requirement compliance violation at the end of the design process is a costly matter. The aim of this research is to investigate how requirement traceability can be improved. This is done by developing a model-based requirement verification framework, which can automatically trace and verify requirements. This framework is also intended to formulate design workflows based on the requirements imposed on the design. The model-based approach is implemented and tested in a practical use case at Fokker Aerostructures in the front-loaded design of a wing box, as well as in a multidisciplinary design optimization problem of a simplified wing at Delft University of Technology. In both use cases, the use of the requirement verification framework led to a better understanding of how a requirement is impacting the system design and enabled the automatic generation of (optimization) workflows from a given set of requirements.