RAAEDS: A Requirements Analysis Aid for Embedded Digital Systems

Abstract

The system design process of refining mission objectives into a system specification must be involved with manual effort, such as checking the missing, incorrect, inconsistent, ambiguous requirements. Besides, it also involves engineering estimation and judgement, tradeoffs, interpretation based on common sense, etc. Therefore, this design process cannot be done fully automatically by state-of-art technology. Many past system failure cases show that human design errors are major factors in this error-prone process. How to help the designers to spot the design errors has been identified as one of the main system design issues. To alleviate the problem, one hundred and five design guidelines are developed and are organized into eighteen categories. These criteria and guidelines are built into a handy database written in ASP language. Hence, the database facilitates the access of these criteria and guidelines and the analysis on functional requirements of digital systems. This work represents important further effort to improve the system design process.