Formalisation of product requirements: from natural language descriptions to formal specifications Online publication date: Thu, 02-Aug-2007
by Zhen Yu Chen, Shengji Yao, Jian Qiang Lin, Yong Zeng, Armin Eberlein
International Journal of Manufacturing Research (IJMR), Vol. 2, No. 3, 2007
Abstract: In engineering design, customers usually provide product requirements in the form of a natural language while computer-aided design systems may prefer more formal and structured specifications. In this paper, a formalisation process is proposed to transform product requirements from its natural language descriptions to a formal specification. The formal specification is based on the product environment and the formulation of design problem, which identifies the components included in a design problem in terms of the product environment. Through the lexical, syntactic, and structure analysis of natural language descriptions of a design problem, the formalisation process identifies the product to be designed, its environment components, and their relations. A software prototype is developed to validate the formalisation process. An example of rivet setting tool design shows that both the formalisation process and software prototype are feasible.
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