Engineering Systems with Standards and Digital Models: Specifying Stakeholder Needs and Capabilities—MGOS

This paper proposes a formal method and associated techniques for completing the ISO/IEC/IEEE Standard 15288 technical process 6.4.2—Stakeholder Needs and Requirements definition within the 15288-SysML Grid framework. The paper is a companion work to Engineering Systems with Standards and Digital Models: Development of a 15288-SysML Grid, which describes an engineering design method that supports the tenets of the Industry 4.0 paradigm. The formal method presented here is grounded using established constructs from systems science; specifically, the systems principles of hierarchy, emergence, requisite parsimony, minimum critical specification, and requisite saliency. The application of accepted principles ensures that stakeholders are able to objectively specify measurable criteria that can satisfy stakeholder needs and capabilities. The method uses: (1) international standards for systems (e.g., ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288); (2) adopts the four fundamental aspects of system design supported by model-based systems engineering (MBSE); (3) invokes the international standard for the systems modeling language (SysML); and (4) adopts a hierarchical requirements tree that specifies Mission, Goals, Objectives, and Sub-objectives (MGOS) to provide the stakeholder-analysis process a means for articulating system-level engineering requirements. Utilization of the MGOS framework is intended to have a positive impact on the system design process by ensuring reproducibility, replicability, transparency, and generalization.