The Customer Requirements Analysis Method of Engineering Products Based on Multiple Preference Information

To effectively evaluate the fuzziness of the market environment in product planning,a customer requirements analysis method based on multiple preference information is proposed.Firstly,decision-makers use a preferred information form to evaluate the importance of each customer requirement.Secondly,a transfer function is employed to unify various forms of preference information into a fuzzy complementary judgment matrix.The ranking vector is then calculated using row and normalization methods,and the initial importance of customer requirements is obtained by aggregating the weights of decision members.Finally,the correction coefficients of initial importance and each demand are synthesized,and the importance of customer requirements is determined through normalization.The development example of the PE jaw crusher demonstrates the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method.

Defect Engineering:Can it Mitigate Strong Coulomb Effect of Mg^(2+)in Cathode Materials for Rechargeable Magnesium Batteries?

Rechargeable magnesium batteries(RMBs)have been considered a promising“post lithium-ion battery”system to meet the rapidly increasing demand of the emerging electric vehicle and grid energy storage market.However,the sluggish diffusion kinetics of bivalent Mg^(2+)in the host material,related to the strong Coulomb effect between Mg^(2+)and host anion lattices,hinders their further development toward practical applications.Defect engineering,regarded as an effective strategy to break through the slow migration puzzle,has been validated in various cathode materials for RMBs.In this review,we first thoroughly understand the intrinsic mechanism of Mg^(2+)diffusion in cathode materials,from which the key factors affecting ion diffusion are further presented.Then,the positive effects of purposely introduced defects,including vacancy and doping,and the corresponding strategies for introducing various defects are discussed.The applications of defect engineering in cathode materials for RMBs with advanced electrochemical properties are also summarized.Finally,the existing challenges and future perspectives of defect engineering in cathode materials for the overall high-performance RMBs are described.

Crowdsourced Requirements Engineering Challenges and Solutions:A Software Industry Perspective

Software crowdsourcing(SW CS)is an evolving software development paradigm,in which crowds of people are asked to solve various problems through an open call(with the encouragement of prizes for the top solutions).Because of its dynamic nature,SW CS has been progressively accepted and adopted in the software industry.However,issues pertinent to the understanding of requirements among crowds of people and requirements engineers are yet to be clarified and explained.If the requirements are not clear to the development team,it has a significant effect on the quality of the software product.This study aims to identify the potential challenges faced by requirements engineers when conducting the SW–CS based requirements engineering(RE)process.Moreover,solutions to overcome these challenges are also identified.Qualitative data analysis is performed on the interview data collected from software industry professionals.Consequently,20 SW–CS based RE challenges and their subsequent proposed solutions are devised,which are further grouped under seven categories.This study is beneficial for academicians,researchers and practitioners by providing detailed SW–CS based RE challenges and subsequent solutions that could eventually guide them to understand and effectively implement RE in SW CS.

Effective Hybrid Content-Based Collaborative Filtering Approach for Requirements Engineering

Requirements engineering(RE)is among the most valuable and critical processes in software development.The quality of this process significantly affects the success of a software project.An important step in RE is requirements elicitation,which involves collecting project-related requirements from different sources.Repositories of reusable requirements are typically important sources of an increasing number of reusable software requirements.However,the process of searching such repositories to collect valuable project-related requirements is time-consuming and difficult to perform accurately.Recommender systems have been widely recognized as an effective solution to such problem.Accordingly,this study proposes an effective hybrid content-based collaborative filtering recommendation approach.The proposed approach will support project stake-holders in mitigating the risk of missing requirements during requirements elicitation by identifying related requirements from software requirement repositories.The experimental results on the RALIC dataset demonstrate that the proposed approach considerably outperforms baseline collaborative filtering-based recom-mendation methods in terms of prediction accuracy and coverage in addition to mitigating the data sparsity and cold-start item problems.

A Requirements Engineering Environment for Embedded Real-Time Software—SREE

The paper presents the embedded real-time software-oriented requirements engineering environment—SREZ. It involves the whole process of software requirements engineering, including the definition, analysis and checking of requirements ,specifications. We first explain the principles of the executable specification language RTRSM. Subsequently, we introduce the main functions of SREE, illustrate the methods and techniques of checking requirements specifications, especially how to perform simulation execution, combining prototyping method with RTRSM and animated representations. At last, we compare the SREE with other requirements specifications methods and make a summary for SREE＇s advantages.

Hermeneutical Engineering of Requirements

The Software Engineering aims to develop, within the deadlines and costs established, quality software and that meets the needs of its users. To be made the definition of what the software should do (to establish its purpose), it included the execution of activity the Requirements Engineering, where the context of software to be developed is identified, examined and specified. All other activities of software development depend primarily on this activity. However, there is a problem increasingly in evidence: understand the context of software to be developed. This article aims to present a proposal to face this problem through the use of specific hermeneutical methods for the Requirements Engineering, which will help the software development team understand the original needs of the business to be attended. The basic idea is to produce a hermeneutic specification acceptable, which will be used for the extraction and the specification of the software requirements to be developed. In essence, the hermeneutics focuses on the true interpretation and understanding in contextualized of what is intended to know. The Hermeneutical Engineering of Requirements comes to be the result of the adequacy of methods hermeneutical to assist, specifically the activity of Engineering of Requirements.

A New Maturity Model for Requirements Engineering Process: An Overview

It is widely acknowledged that Requirements Engineering (RE) has an important implication for the overall success of software or system development projects. As more and more organizations consider RE as the principal problem areas in the projects, improving RE process therefore appears critical for future business success. Moreover, nowadays there are evidences that support improving RE process maturity can contributes to improved business performance. There exist generic Software Process Improvement (SPI) standards, specialised RE process improvement models as well as guidance and advices on RE. However, they suffer from various issues that limit their adoption by organizations that are interested to assess and improve their RE process capability. Therefore, the research presented in this paper proposes a new RE process improvement model. The model is built by adapting and expanding the structure of the continuous representation of the formal maturity framework Capability Maturity Model Integration for Development (CMMI-DEV) developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) through three rounds of development and validation stages, which involved RE and CMMI expert panel in the software industry. This paper aims to provide an overview on what, why and how we build the maturity model for RE. The intention is to provide a foundation for future development in the area of RE process improvement.

A Knowledge Management Framework in Software Requirements Engineering Based on the SECI Model

Software requirements engineering deals with: elicitation, specification, and validation of software requirements. Furthermore there is a need to facilitate collaboration amongst stakeholders and analysts. Fewer efforts were deployed to support them in performing their job on a day to day basis. To solve this problem we use knowledge management for software requirements engineering. This paper proposes a knowledge management framework, based on the SECI model of knowledge creation, aimed at exploiting tacit and explicit knowledge related to software requirements within a given software project. The core part of the proposed framework is a set of four sub systems “Socializer”;“Externalizer”;“Combiner”;and “Internalizer”, attached to a couple of domain ontologies and a set of knowledge assets. Indeed we aim to facilitate a semantic based interpretation of knowledge assets related to software requirements by restricting their interpretation through the application domain and software requirements ontologies. We anticipate that this framework would be very helpful for stakeholders as well as analysts to exchange and manage their knowledge within a given software project. We show in the case study, through a virtual payroll project using the two-step approach: domain level requirements plus design level requirements, how the key elicitation SRE techniques are used during the first phase of domain requirements elicitation through the four subsystems of our framework.

Barriers and Challenges to the Sustainability Requirements Implementation in Public Procurement of Engineering Works and Services

The environmental damage arising from the construction and engineering services was responsible for the appearance of several norms and resolutions regulating and directing the sector’s performance. In this article, we research how professionals with experience in public bids assess the difficulty degree of the implementation of those requirements and how they assess the environmental legislation regarding the protection and conservation of the environment, impact on costs, deadlines and the solution to environmental problems. The results show that industry professionals consider as “high” the level of difficulty to implement the addressed sustainability requirements, and that the Brazilian environmental legislation does not comply with its environmental protection role, increases the possibility of delays and costs of projects and services and hampers the emergence of solutions that could solve environmental problems.

Introduction to a Requirements Engineering Framework for Aeronautics

This paper introduces a framework to produce and to manage quality requirements of embedded aeronautical systems, called the ‘Requirements Engineering Framework’ (REF). It aims at making the management of the requirement lifecycle easier, from the specification of the purchaser’s needs, to their implementation in the final products, and also their verification, while controlling costs. REF is based on the main standards of aeronautics, in particular RTCA DO-254, and RTCA DO-178B standards. An implementation of REF, using the IBM Rational DOORS and IBM Rational Change tools, is also presented in this paper.

A Survey of Approaches Reconciling between Safety and Security Requirements Engineering for Cyber-Physical Systems

The fields of safety and security use different conceptual standards and methods. As a consequence, these two separate but related research areas utilize different approaches. Addressing the integration between safety and security concerns in this context, we would conduct a survey exploring approaches and standards that were created by the scholars to combine safety and security requirement engineering.

Icons:Visual Representation to Enrich Requirements Engineering Work

Adapting icons in requirements engineering can support the multifaceted needs of stakeholders. Conventional approaches to RE are mainly highlighted in diagrams. This paper introduces icon-based information as a way to represent ideas and concepts in the requirements engineering domain. We report on icon artifacts that support requirements engineering work such as priority types, status states and stakeholder kinds. We evaluate how users interpret meanings of icons and the efficacy of icon prototypes shaped to represent those requirements attributes. Our hypothesis is whether practitioners can recognize the icons’ meaning in terms of their functional representation. According to the empirical data from 45 participants, the findings demonstrate the probability of providing users with icons and their intended functions that correspond to RE artifacts in a novel yet effective manner. Based on these findings, we suggest that icons could enrich stakeholders’ perception of the RE process as a whole;however, meaningful interpretation of an icon is subject to the user’s prior knowledge and experience.

Process-Oriented Requirements Engineering: User-Centric LORS Framework

In recent years, the process orientation requirements engineering field has received significant interest. However, dealing with ordinary users within an enterprise for developing as-is business process is very complex because this requires skills, responsibility, knowledge, and expertise of business processes. This research answers the following questions: 1) how to systematically gather information regarding as-is business process requirements in an informal environment and by non-expert users? and 2) how can an enterprise refine the identified business process with a semantic process model? The primary purpose of this research is to develop a supporting framework that is suitable for the definition of an as-is business process to be deployed within the enterprise environment. Hence, the focus is on gathering requirements to define the as-is business process. This framework concentrates on three significant aspects of this process: development, refinement, and serialization the semantics of the process model. To accomplish this objective, the LORS framework has been proposed, which consists of four phases (List, Order, Refinement, and Serialization). The framework presents a new unique technique to identify the business process, refine the process, and generate the model semantics. This study assumes that a simple and complete framework will help non-expert users define a high-quality as-is process, such that enhance and facilitate the matching process with existing reference models. We present a case study, evaluate the case study relative to specified criteria, and research the limitations and implications discovered from our research. This research concludes that the LORS framework is simple, flexible, visible, interactive, dynamic, and effective.

Developing Dependability Requirements Engineering for Secure and Safe Information Systems with Knowledge Acquisition for Automated Specification

Our dependability on software in every aspect of our lives has exceeded the level that was expected in the past. We have now reached a point where we are currently stuck with technology, and it made life much easier than before. The rapid increase of technology adoption in the different aspects of life has made technology affordable and has led to an even stronger adoption in the society. As technology advances, almost every kind of technology is now connected to the network like infrastructure, automobiles, airplanes, chemical factories, power stations, and many other systems that are business and mission critical. Because of our high dependency on technology in most, if not all, aspects of life, a system failure is considered to be very critical and might result in harming the surrounding environment or put human life at risk. We apply our conceptual framework to integration between security and safety by creating a SaS (Safety and Security) domain model. Furthermore, it demonstrates that it is possible to use goal-oriented KAOS (Knowledge Acquisition in automated Specification) language in threat and hazard analysis to cover both safety and security domains making their outputs, or artifacts, well-structured and comprehensive, which results in dependability due to the comprehensiveness of the analysis. The conceptual framework can thereby act as an interface for active interactions in risk and hazard management in terms of universal coverage, finding solutions for differences and contradictions which can be overcome by integrating the safety and security domains and using a unified system analysis technique (KAOS) that will result in analysis centrality. For validation we chose the Systems-Theoretic Accident Model and Processes (STAMP) approach and its modelling language, namely System-Theoretic Process Analysis for safety (STPA), on the safety side and System-Theoretic Process Analysis for Security (STPA-sec) on the security side in order to be the base of the experiment in comparison to what was done in SaS. The concepts of SaS domain model were applied on STAMP approach using the same example @RemoteSurgery.

A Metamodel for Agile Requirements Engineering

Value delivery is becoming an important asset for an organization due to increasing competition in industry. Therefore, companies apply Agile Software Development (ASD) to be more competitive and reduce time to market. Using ASD for the development of systems implies that established approaches of Requirements Engineering (RE) undergo some changes in order to be more flexible to changing requirements. To this end, the field of agile RE is emergent and different process models for agile RE have arisen. The aim of this paper is to build an abstract layer about the variety of existing process models by means of a metamodel for agile RE. It has been created in several iterations and relies on the evaluation of related process models. Furthermore, we have derived process models for agile RE in industry by presenting instances of the metamodel in two different cases: one is based on Scrum whereas the other is based on Kanban. This paper contributes to the software development body of knowledge by delivering a metamodel for agile RE that supports researchers and practitioners modeling and improving their own process models. We can conclude that the agile RE metamodel is highly relevant for the industry as well as for the research community, since we have derived it following empirical research in the field of ASD.

The Analysis and Proposed Modifications to ISO/IEC 25030—Software Engineering—Software Quality Requirements and Evaluation—Quality Requirements

The quality of the software product is a crucial factor that contributes to its success. Therefore, it is important to specify the right software quality requirements that will establish the basis for desired quality of the final system/software product. There are several known methodologies/ processes that support the specification of the system/software functional requirements starting from the user needs to finally obtain the system requirements that the developers can implement through their development process. System/software quality requirements are interdependent with functional requirements, which means that the system/software quality requirements are meant to be specified in parallel with the latter. The ISO/IEC 25000 [1] SQuaRE series of standards include the standard ISO/IEC 25030—Software engineering—Software Quality Requirements and Evaluation—Quality requirements [2], which has as main goal to help specify software quality requirements. As to date, this standard does not offer clear and concise steps that a software quality engineer could follow in order to specify them. This article presents modifications recommended for ISO/IEC 25030 standard, with, among the others, a new requirements definition process that allows for specifying the system/software quality requirements taking into account the existing published system and software quality model ISO/IEC 25010 [3] as well as all the stake- holders of the project.

Biomimetic natural biomaterials for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine:new biosynthesis methods,recent advances,and emerging applications

Biomimetic materials have emerged as attractive and competitive alternatives for tissue engineering(TE)and regenerative medicine.In contrast to conventional biomaterials or synthetic materials,biomimetic scaffolds based on natural biomaterial can offer cells a broad spectrum of biochemical and biophysical cues that mimic the in vivo extracellular matrix(ECM).Additionally,such materials have mechanical adaptability,micro-structure interconnectivity,and inherent bioactivity,making them ideal for the design of living implants for specific applications in TE and regenerative medicine.This paper provides an overview for recent progress of biomimetic natural biomaterials(BNBMs),including advances in their preparation,functionality,potential applications and future challenges.We highlight recent advances in the fabrication of BNBMs and outline general strategies for functionalizing and tailoring the BNBMs with various biological and physicochemical characteristics of native ECM.Moreover,we offer an overview of recent key advances in the functionalization and applications of versatile BNBMs for TE applications.Finally,we conclude by offering our perspective on open challenges and future developments in this rapidly-evolving field.

Compositional and Hollow Engineering of Silicon Carbide/Carbon Microspheres as High-Performance Microwave Absorbing Materials with Good Environmental Tolerance

Microwave absorbing materials(MAMs)characterized by high absorption efficiency and good environmental tolerance are highly desirable in practical applications.Both silicon carbide and carbon are considered as stable MAMs under some rigorous conditions,while their composites still fail to produce satisfactory microwave absorption performance regardless of the improvements as compared with the individuals.Herein,we have successfully implemented compositional and structural engineering to fabricate hollow Si C/C microspheres with controllable composition.The simultaneous modulation on dielectric properties and impedance matching can be easily achieved as the change in the composition of these composites.The formation of hollow structure not only favors lightweight feature,but also generates considerable contribution to microwave attenuation capacity.With the synergistic effect of composition and structure,the optimized SiC/C composite exhibits excellent performance,whose the strongest reflection loss intensity and broadest effective absorption reach-60.8 dB and 5.1 GHz,respectively,and its microwave absorption properties are actually superior to those of most SiC/C composites in previous studies.In addition,the stability tests of microwave absorption capacity after exposure to harsh conditions and Radar Cross Section simulation data demonstrate that hollow SiC/C microspheres from compositional and structural optimization have a bright prospect in practical applications.