A SYSTEMATIC APPROACH FOR THE SPECIFICATION OF CUSTOMER REQUIREMENTS

• Published in: Proceedings of the Canadian Engineering Education Association (CEEA) 2011-08
• Main Authors: Chen, Zhenyu, Yao, Shengji, Zeng, Yong
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 2371-5243; 2371-5243
• DOI: 10.24908/pceea.v0i0.4028

Specification of customer requirements is critical for designers to solve a design problem and to deliver a quality design. This paper proposes a systematic approach to formalize various customer requirements using the axiomatic theory of design modeling. The input of this formalization process is the design requirements described in natural language by the customers. The output is a structure underlying these design requirements for designers to use throughout the rest of the design process. This structure of design problem consists of three parts: product, environment, and structural as well as performance requirements. The formalization process includes two major steps: linguistic analysis and structure analysis. The linguistic analysis identifies objects and their relationships included in the customer description of a design problem through the lexical and syntactical properties of words and sentences that form the design problem. The structure analysis integrates all objects and relationships identified from linguistic analysis to form a structure of the design problem. A software prototype is developed to show the feasibility of this approach.