Towards a seamless requirements management in system design using a higraph-based model

The application of efficient requirement management processes in industrial environments faces many threats. Most of existing tools for requirement statement, edition and traceability are spreadsheet-like and text-based. However, text-based tools are sequential and often suffer of being either ambiguous or hard to process; while graphical tools are multidimensional with diagrams containing implicit information that can be easily drawn by the user. Besides, requirement management activities are often almost disconnected from the other design and development activities. This situation leads to impossibility to keep consistency between requirements themselves and between requirements and development steps such as functional architecture, physical architecture, and simulation. To give an answer to the issues stated, this paper presents a solution to perform an efficient requirement modeling during the system design cycle using a higraph-based formalism. It explores several axes: system representation using metamodels and working/filter views. Through these axes, we focus on requirements from several perspectives: graphical representations, semantic representations and the aiding formalism to keep efficient traceability all over development cycle.