Abstract

The objective of the present thesis is to transform the customer requirement described in a natural language into a formal specification. The effective specification of product requirements is critical for designers to deliver a quality design solution in a reasonable range of cost and time. No significant research results have been reported in the literature regarding the generation of formal design specification, regardless of its important roles in product development. A good specification depends on a well-defined classification and categorization of product requirements, on flexible means of representation that can capture the various structures behind the requirements, and also on the formalization of natural language based description of the design problem. The present thesis proposes two criteria to classify the product requirements based on the structure of the product-environment. A graphical language, named ROM, is developed to represent the formal specification of the design problem. Since majority of design problems are described in a natural language, the relationship between the formal specification and the structure of natural language is investigated in the present thesis by the formal linguistic analysis