Evaluation of model based specifications integrated into airbus tool and process environment

The successful development of complex systems within cost and time limits is a challenging task. Many industrial projects fail to achieve the key success factors of 'time to market' and 'meeting stakeholder needs'. Studies in practice have identified requirements deficiencies as the main reason for project failure and delay. To address these problems, science proposes several approaches in the context of Systems Engineering. Two notable examples are Requirements Engineering (RE) and model-driven approaches such as Model-Driven Engineering (MDE). Their implementation is however not widespread in practice and the degree of realization varies. While their advantages are largely accepted, the transition to these structured approaches is difficult because of the heavy impact on the development process and organization. At Airbus the need for an improved development process was recognized to face the increasing challenges in aircraft industry. To this end Requirements Based Engineering (RBE), which is a development process with a strong focus on RE, has been put in place. While RBE itself is still new, there are ongoing activities to further improve this engineering process. One of these projects targeting at process improvement is an initiative of Airbus called Functional Approach (FA). In the context of FA, model-based specifications are to be integrated into the RBE process. The introduction of MDE concepts has an impact on the established way of working, leading to a new development process. This thesis will deal with the mapping of this new development process to the existing process and tool environment. The selected tool environment will be evaluated and improved in order to support the application of FA in the current Airbus long-range aircraft development project.