Towards a Systems Engineering Pattern Language: Applying i* to Model Requirements-Architecture Patterns.
Pete Pavan, Neil Maiden, Xiaohong Zhu · 2003
This paper reports the results of exploratory research to develop a pilot pattern language for systems engineers at BAE SYSTEMS. The pattern language was designed to encapsulate knowledge about possible trade-offs made by systems engineers about architecture designs that satisfied different system requirements for submarine manoeuvring systems. Our intention is that this knowledge can be reused in future systems engineering processes using our ART-SCENE environment. Knowledge about requirements, design alternatives and the complex trade-off space was elicited from systems engineers. To model this knowledge we applied the i * formalism to represent the design space and design trade-offs, and to communicate the resulting patterns back to the engineers for validation and improvement. The research was a success, in that we produced a pattern language of 4 key patterns and their interactions for a submarine manoeuvring system, all using the i* formalism. The paper ends with a review of this research and how we plan to exploit the language to inform scenario-driven trade-offs between requirements satisfaction and architecture choice using the ART-SCENE environment.