A requirement ontology for engineering design

We present an ontology for representing requirements that supports a generic requirements management process in engineering design domain. The requirement ontology we propose is a part of a more general ontology to capture engineering design knowledge. Objects included in this general ontology are parts, features, requirements, and constraints. We define a generic requirements management process and raise issues that any requirement representation must address like communication, traceability, completeness, consistency, document creation, and managing change. We use first-order logic to define the objects and their attributes, and identify the axioms capturing the constraints and relationships among the objects. We show how the axioms can be used in answering the issues raised.