A Topic Modeling Approach to Study Design Requirements

Risk management is vital to a product’s lifecycle. The current practice of reducing risks relies on domain experts or management tools to identify unexpected engineering changes, where such approaches are prone to human errors and laborious operations. However, this study presents a framework to contribute to requirements management by implementing a generative probabilistic model, the supervised latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) with collapsed Gibbs sampling (CGS), to study the topic composition within three unlabeled and unstructured industrial requirements documents. As finding the preferred number of topics remains an open-ended question, a case study estimates an appropriate number of topics to represent each requirements document based on both perplexity and coherence values. Using human evaluations and interpretable visualizations, the result demonstrates the different level of design details by varying the number of topics. Further, a relevance measurement provides the flexibility to improve the quality of topics. Designers can increase design efficiency by understanding, organizing, and analyzing high-volume requirements documents in confirmation management based on topics across different domains. With domain knowledge and purposeful interpretation of topics, designers can make informed decisions on product evolution and mitigate the risks of unexpected engineering changes.

PRODUCT REQUIREMENTS SPECIFICATION PROCESS IN PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

Requirements engineering and requirements management are essential sub-processes of product development and are an integrated part of virtually all product development models and industrial process descriptions. Proprietary and context specific processes for working with requirements are used in industrial design practice. However, these are not appropriately reflected in existing process models for product development. Existing standards describe the content and generation of requirements documents but not their integration in the product development process.The study is based on a retrospective analysis of a set of representative real-world product development projects from automotive industry and rail industry. Comparing the processes downstream the milestone “release of PRD”, it was found that subsequent processes to manage requirements and specifications do not differ much with regard to industrial context. Based on this, a model for the product requirements specification (PRS) process is proposed which addresses the gap.

Pavement Design in the USA

The methodology for calculating pavements used in the United States is discussed in this article. The article contains the principles of pavement design outlined in the manual “P. Design of New and Reconstructed Flexible Pavements. Part 3”, which are used by designers not only in the United States, but also in many countries around the world. Differences in approaches to pavement design in the Russian Federation and the United States are shown. It is marked that in difference from Russia, where requirements documents are valid on all territory of the country, in America each state develops its own requirements documentation, however the general principles of designing presented in the above-mentioned manual, remain invariable. In order to compare the pavement structures used in Russia and the USA the author has given examples of constructions developed on the basis of the US guidelines and has shown the main differences of these constructions from those which are traditionally applied in our road construction. In addition, the author draws attention to the fact that in contrast to Russia in the U.S. roads usually have a non-rigid type of pavement, which significantly increases their strength and durability

The test results of graduates transport universities for knowledge of regulatory requirements documents on the safety of movement of trains

Conducting a comparison of violations committed by employees of the movement economy and errors made during testing for knowledge of PTE.

Quality Assurance Techniques in SRS Documents

For development of software, the most important aspects are the software requirements. They are the foundation stone for initiating any software development process. Software requirements documents contain the needs of the customers in natural language. By using various methods like reviews, inspections, walkthroughs, the content of the software requirement can be checked manually to reduce ambiguity. In recent years there is an attempt to automate these activities as a result of advancement in automation of natural language analysis. Automation of text mining techniques and text analysis is leading to feasibility of automation of requirements documents processing. The process can be completed in minutes now which were taking weeks earlier. Automation of analysis of text has triggered numerous possibilities for quality assurance of requirements. The possibilities of automation are model checking automation, automated rule checking, automated test case execution and measurement automation. In future more tools will enter the scene for automation of requirements quality assurance. At present most of them are in experimental stage. There is a definite need for more research in this field.

Relation between Breaking Stresses in the Strength Calculations of Reinforced Concrete Elements under the Deformation Mode in the Edition of Russian and Foreign Regulatory Documents

Сorrespondence was established between the compressive strength grades of concrete numerically equal to the guaranteed compressive strength of a standard concrete cube and a standard concrete cylinder. Designated concrete resistances are assigned for the limiting states of the first group with a compressive strength grade of concrete. For the corresponding concrete grades, the reduction to unambiguous strains values at the base diagrams points is justified: at the top and at the end of the falling branch of the curvilinear diagrams. In accordance with the regulatory requirements, restrictions are imposed on the stress levels at the end of the falling diagrams branch at the maximum normalized strains values. Mathematical models establishing a uniform format for calculating single-valued strains values at base points of concrete diagrams have been developed taking into account accepted functional relations and the their assignment rules using the requirements documents tables. It is shown that with equal strains values and stresses at base points, analytical expressions describing diagrams recommended by requirement documents, different in their structure, give their identical outlines, the diagrams branches are the same. Relation between design models in the edition of Russian and foreign regulatory documents is correlated by the comparison of integral diagrams parameters and breaking stresses obtained with the calculation of reinforced concrete element under the deformation mode. As integral parameters of concrete deformation diagrams, it is recommended to use the areas bounded by diagrams branches and diagrams fineness coefficient. The diagram area for given values of the element curvature is equivalent to the magnitude of the breaking stress in the compressed concrete zone in the bent and compressed elements, and the stress diagram in outline corresponds to this diagram.