Knowledge-Based Requirements Engineering for Reconfigurable Precision Assembly Systems

Reconfigurable Precision Assembly Systems are being developed in response to assembly systems becoming obsolete due to condensed product life cycles being so closely linked with assembly system life cycles. However methods and tools to promote the use of the hardware technology, which is centred on the deployment of reconfigurable modules, are non-existent. The paper presents a knowledge-based requirements engineering approach that gathers user requirements and converts them into system requirements using knowledge rules stored within a database structure. This is illustrated through a case study.