A prescriptive approach to qualify and quantify customer value for value-based requirements engineering

Recently, customer-based product development is becoming a popular paradigm. Customer expectations and needs can be identified and transformed into requirements for product design with the help of various methods and tools. However, in many cases, these models fail to focus on the perceived value that is crucial when customers make the decision of purchasing a product. In this paper, a prescriptive approach to support value-based requirements engineering (RE) is proposed, describing the foundations, procedures and initial applications in the context of RE for commercial aircraft. An integrated set of techniques, such as means-ends analysis, part-whole analysis and multi-attribute utility theory is introduced in order to understand customer values in depth and width. Technically, this enables identifying the implicit value, structuring logically collected statements of customer expectations and performing value modelling and simulation. Additionally, it helps to put in place a system to measure customer satisfaction that is derived from the proposed approach. The approach offers significant potential to develop effective value creation strategies for the development of new product

Computational framework for interactive architecting of complex systems

Presented is a novel framework for interactive systems architecture definition at early design stages. It incorporates graph‐theoretic data structures, entity relationships, and algorithms that enable the systems architect to operate interactively and simultaneously in different domains. It explicitly captures the “zigzagging” of the functional reasoning process, including not only allocated, but also the derived functions. A prototype software tool, AirCADia Architect, was implemented, which allowed the framework to be demonstrated to and tried hands‐on by practicing aircraft systems architects. The tool enables architects to effectively express their ideas when interactively synthesizing new architectures, while still retaining control over the process. The proposed approach was especially acknowledged as the way forward for rationale capture