Interactive Constraint Acquisition for Concurrent Engineering

The issue of automated requirement elicitation has significant relevance for Concurrent Engineering. Firstly, Concurrent Engineering relies on the ability of teams of experts to be able to communicate their requirements to each other effectively. Secondly, the number of requirements that are considered during a product development project can be large. Therefore, the development of automated techniques for requirement acquisition seems like a promising approach for dealing with this complexity. In this paper we report on the current status of our research agenda focused on automating the process of acquiring requirements from examples. We combine techniques from the fields of constraint processing and machine learning as the basis for our solution. In addition to presenting our technique, we report on its evaluation and demonstrate its applicability to a real-world scenario.