Agile Methodology for the Standardization of Engineering Requirements Using Large Language Models

Abstract

The increased complexity of modern systems is calling for an integrated and comprehensive approach to system design and development and, in particular, a shift toward Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) approaches for system design. The requirements that serve as the foundation for these intricate systems are still primarily expressed in Natural Language (NL), which can contain ambiguities and inconsistencies and suffer from a lack of structure that hinders their direct translation into models. The colossal developments in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), in general, and Large Language Models (LLMs), in particular, can serve as an enabler for the conversion of NL requirements into machine-readable requirements. Doing so is expected to facilitate their standardization and use in a model-based environment. This paper discusses a two-fold strategy for converting NL requirements into machine-readable requirements using language models. The first approach involves creating a requirements table by extracting information from free-form NL requirements. The second approach consists of an agile methodology that facilitates the identification of boilerplate templates for different types of requirements based on observed linguistic patterns. For this study, three different LLMs are utilized. Two of these models are fine-tuned versions of Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERTs), specifically, aeroBERT-NER and aeroBERT-Classifier, which are trained on annotated aerospace corpora. Another LLM, called flair/chunk-english, is utilized to identify sentence chunks present in NL requirements. All three language models are utilized together to achieve the standardization of requirements. The effectiveness of the methodologies is demonstrated through the semi-automated creation of boilerplates for requirements from Parts 23 and 25 of Title 14 Code of Federal Regulations (CFRs).