The Autocode project has been spending the last 6 months studying the current practices involved in developing requirements documents. This involved classifying the different types of systems along with the different airplane system architectures and how current and perceived tools could be applied (e.g. displays, controls, etc).
Our study has analyzed Specification Control Drawings (SCD), which are the contractual requirements document, and broke them down into different representations used and technologies we perceive could be applied to them. Current specification representations include: structured and unstructured English, data tables, flow charts, PDL, state transition diagrams, and control law block diagrams. We now plan to map existing or proposed tools into these representations in a way that is both acceptable, and one that exploits software reuse libraries and code generation techniques.
Fostering reuse at BCAG is a very difficult problem but the Autocode Research Group feels the approach we are taking, solving complex but domain specific applications, should help lay a foundation for a Boeing wide reuse effort.