Requirements Engineering in Complex Systems Design

The realization of nuclear fusion reaction as energy source is under investigation, among the scientific community, through the design and development of tokamak reactors. Among the several experiments worldwide, the ITER project is the major international experiment and it involves several research institutes from several countries. In such a project, a Systems Engineering (SE) approach is requested to organize and manage the design due to its highly integrated design, the safety requirements related to nuclear aspects and the complex procurement scheme. The SE discipline focuses the attention on the requirements which are crucial for every successful project, defining what the stakeholders want from a potential new system, namely what the system must do to satisfy stakeholders need. Correctly stating WHAT is needed for the system, it is possible to obtain its conceptual design (HOW) as much as possible complying the requirements. The incorrect definition of requirements often leads to the failing of a project. Stakeholders’ needs are written in Natural Language that is generally ambiguous, imprecise, incomplete and redundant. Their transformation into SMART requirements is crucial to avoid design failure. However, it requires a great expertise, unless a specific procedure is assessed. To this end, this work presents a specific procedure based on “like-mind” processes to make systematic the SMART requirements definition and assessment from stakeholders needs. The procedure is based on a demand/response framework and it is developed to obtain ITER requirements. However, it can be easily extended to every project using its own specifications. A specific case study on ITER Remote Handling is presented in this paper as example of the conceived requirements transformation procedure.