IRIS — A mapping assistant for generating designs from requirements

Abstract

The problem of generating information system designs from requirements specifications is addressed, with the presentation of a framework for representing requirements and a mapping assistant, IRIS³, that facilitates the design generation process. Requirements are viewed as knowledge bases and the knowledge representation formalism for the prototype, also the language for implementing IRIS, is Telos which provides facilities for describing entities and relationships and for representing and reasoning with temporal knowledge. The generation of a design is achieved with a mapping process from requirements which is: (i) Locally guided by dependency types determining allowable mappings of an element of a requirements model, (ii) globally guided by non-functional requirements, such as accuracy and security requirements on the intended system, represented as goals describing desirable properties of the intended system and used to guide local decisions.

The paper details a prototype implementation (IRIS) of the proposed mapping framework and illustrates its features through a sample session.

This is a report on results from the DAIDA project, funded in part by the European Commission through the Esprit programme under contract no. 892 [Jarke86]; financial support for this research was also received from the Institute of Computer Science of the Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH), the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the University of Toronto.

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