Semantically-driven Interpretation of Stakeholder Requirements and Quantification of Impact to Layout Design

Requirements elucidation is a significant part of early-stage ship design, especially in naval architecture for complex ships. During a vessel’s acquisition process, the stakeholders propose requirements in statements, regulations, Concepts of Operations (CONOPS), vignettes, and Minutes of Meetings, all expressed in natural language. However, bridging these natural language requirements and their impact on the final design remains an open research problem. This research proposes a framework that utilizes semantics interpretation to map the natural language requirements (R) to the layers of the systems architecture: Functional (F), Logical (L), and Physical (P). This paper proposes to use semantics to better understand the effect of requirements on design change occurring in the logical and physical architecture layers of the system architecture. This research also introduces the classification of the requirements on a two-dimensional axis system, with one axis being their importance to the stakeholders and the other axis evaluating their elasticity (i.e., if they can be interpreted in more than one way). This classification provides insights into the characteristics of requirements that may impact the physical design. The proposed framework shows potential for identifying and tracing the propagation of changes and uncertainties stemming from the requirements to the other layers of the systems architecture. This paper showcases the framework through a case study on the semantic interpretation of redundancy and safety regulations for the design of a short-sea vessel’s engine room. The results show that hard” and ”elastic” safety requirements are more influential on the layout arrangement and
thus the shape of the generated design space.