Intelligent Adaptive Needs Characterization for M&S Systems Engineering

System requirements elicitation is a time consuming process with an extremely high penalty for errors. Mistakes made in the requirements phase will cost 50 times more to fix while they are uncovered in the production phase as compared to fixing them in the requirements phase. VIStology and Northeastern University are proposing to develop an approach for supporting the requirements elicitation phase with computer tools. Our approach will include tool support for analyzing requirements represented in text, extracting information from text and representing it in a formal language with computer processable semantics, analyzing the formal representation of specifications, storing the formal representations for future extraction and comparison, and guiding the systems engineer who will be in the loop of requirements formalization and analysis. We will provide an initial prototype of the system that will proof the feasibility of the proposed approach. Moreover, we will provide an assessment of the usability and the efficiency of the approach via experimentation with Northeastern graduate students.