Collaborative Research: Exploring the Evolution of Design Requirements Throughout the Design Process Using Network Models

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All design problems are constrained by a set of requirements that must be satisfied at project delivery. However, requirements change over the span of a project's duration, causing the "moving target phenomenon," and jeopardizing the success of the project. Changes in requirements may occur due to changes in technology, consumer trends, perceptions, or regulations. Such requirements volatility is particularly important in complex systems that require several years for design and manufacturing or those that contain tens of thousands of requirements. Research has shown that over half of failed projects occurred due to failure stemming from requirements and their management, hindering market success, innovation, and engineering pursuits in the United States. The goal of this research is to understand how requirements change, and more importantly, their effect on other elements of design. Whereas an engineer may consider the impact of a requirement change, it is difficult to process how this may affect several other requirements or system components. Understanding how requirements change, and their effect on other elements of the design process may change how we design and utilize requirements throughout the design process.Although requirements form the backbone of every engineering project, the formal reasoning support needed to analyze requirements is limited. Understanding their use outside of the early (elicitation) and late (satisfying) phases of design can contribute to understanding what happens in the interim, a volatile process recognized yet not well understood. The objective of this research is to advance the fundamental understanding of engineering requirements evolution within systems design. This research addresses a gap in both describing and prescribing how engineers use and, more importantly, could use requirements throughout the design process. A specific exploration will focus on measuring and then predicting requirements volatility. To this end, this research will enhance an existing Requirement Change Propagation Prediction Method to incorporate graph theoretic metrics needed to measure volatility. Both quantitative and qualitative data is collected during a three-year, multi-case study spanning 2,760 different requirements documents from varying design projects. Requirements and their change data will be analyzed to determine if volatility metrics could be used to understand how requirements evolve. This research will enable engineers to analyze requirements early in the design process to assess the volatility of individual requirements as they relate to other requirements. This adds value to the design process by allowing engineers and designers a means to analyze change propagation and impact before committing to changes.