A Case Study in Challenging and Validating Engineering Requirements with Value-Based Techniques

Requirements are an essential element to engineering design as they are used to focus idea generation during conceptual design, provide criteria for decision making during concept selection, and verify the chosen concept fulfills product needs. Because they are essential to the entire design process, great emphasis needs to be put on ensuring that they are correct. This research focuses on a value-based methodology useful for challenging and validating established requirements. A case study was conducted using this process on a project involving the design of a vehicle seat. This case study shows that this approach provides more persuasive evidence to challenge requirements when they seem to be incorrect over other evidence such as experiential or notional evidence. The results of the procedure followed in the case study are used to propose a potential process for future projects needing requirement challenging