Intelligent Adaptive Needs Characterization for M&S Systems Engineering

The first, and arguably the most important, step in systems engineering is gathering stakeholder needs. Being able to elicit accurate, actionable needs from a stakeholder is nearly an art and is very difficult to standardize as each set of stakeholders may have drastically different needs. It is the intent of this effort to develop a process and set of algorithms that will provide rigor to and aid the needs elicitation process. The ISSAC Corp Systems Engineering Toolset (SETs) is a complete Systems Engineering life cycle management integrated process. This nine step process relies heavily on successful completion of the three first steps: use case identification, needs definition, and understanding the Operational Environment. This is critical for any SE program. We will propose a solution to gathering and managing these requirement definitions using a novel approach, using technology and art to identify the needs with the multiple stakeholders and managing this information in a single repository enabling semantics analysis techniques, use of algorithms to manage and associate the data, and help the engineering teams solicit the correct information from the stakeholders.