Requirements Evolution is one of the main issues that affect development activities as well as system features (e.g., system dependability). Although researchers and practitioners recognise the importance of requirements evolution, research results and experience are still patchy. This points out a lack of methodologies that address requirements evolution. This thesis investigates the current u...

Software development teams are often geographically distributed from their customers and end users. This creates significant communication and coordination challenges that impact the effectiveness of requirements engineering. Travel costs, and the local availability of quality technical staff increase the demand for effective distributed software development teams. This research reports an empi...

Traditional approaches to requirements elicitation stress systematic and rational analysis and representation of organizational context and system requirements. This paper argues that the introduction of any computer-based system to an organization transforms the organization and changes the work patterns of the system’s users in the organization. These changes interact with the users’ values a...

There are many problems associated with requirements engineering, including problems in defining the system scope, problems in fostering understanding among the different communities affected by the development of a given system, and problems in dealing with the volatile nature of requirements. These problems may lead to poor requirements and the cancellation of system development, or else the ...

This paper examines the use of Bayesian Networks to tackle one of the tougher problems in requirements engineering, translating user requirements into system requirements. The approach taken is to model domain knowledge as Bayesian Network fragments that are glued together to form a complete view of the domain specific system requirements. User requirements are introduced as evidence and the pr...

Several diseases caused by viruses, bacteria and fungi affect plant crops, resulting in losses and decreasing the quality and safety of agricultural products. Plant disease control relies mainly on chemical pesticides that are currently subject to strong restrictions and regulatory requirements. Antimicrobial peptides are interesting compounds in plant health because there is a need for new pro...

High-throughput separations are intrinsic to the detection and analysis of peptides and proteins by mass spectrometry (MS). Together, efficient separation and MS can lead to the identification of thousands of proteins in a sample, cell or tissue and help build proteome maps that can be used to define a cell type or cellular state. Although 2D gels have been successfully used to separate protein...

This article provides support in organizing and implementing novel concepts for enhancing safety on a cluster level of chemical plants. The paper elaborates the requirements for integrating safety management systems of chemical plants situated within a so-called chemical cluster. Recommendations of existing Plant Safety Management System Codes of Good Practice are analyzed in relation to the ne...

ÐIn this paper, we describe the incremental specification of a power transformer station controller using a controller synthesis methodology. We specify the main requirements as simple properties, named control objectives, that the controlled plant has to satisfy. Then, using algebraic techniques, the controller is automatically derived from this set of control objectives. In our case, the plan...