A Model-driven Requirements Engineering Approach to Conceptual Satellite Design

Satellite systems are growing even more complex, making technical issues a significant driver of costs. The increasing complexity of these systems makes requirements engineering activities both more important and more difficult. Additionally, nowadays strong market competition drive companies to improve the efficiency with which they design and manufacture space products and systems. This imposes a heavy burden on systems-of-systems engineering skills and particularly on requirements engineering which is an important phase in a system’s life cycle. A poorly attained requirement engineering approach may cause design failures, cost overrun and delays. One solution is to underpin the preliminary conceptual satellite design with computer-based information reuse and integration to deal with interdisciplinary nature of this problem domain. This can be attained by taking a model-driven engineering approach (MDE), in which models are the main artifact during system development. MDE is an emergent approach that tries to address system complexity by the intense use of models. This work outlines the use of SysML (Systems Modeling Language) for requirements engineering, more specifically requirements management and traceability. It is intended to use this approach in the conceptualphase of a semi-professional satellite system called ITASAT, currently being built by INPE and some Brazilian universities.