Systems engineering
Underground Electric Loader — Ep. 3 “Requirements”
A story of development of the autonomous underground electric loader. Episode 3 covers the beginning of concept development stages: customer needs identification, target requirements, and system analysis.
Underground Electric Loader — This article is part of a series.
Episode 2: Strategy Development
Episode 3: Requirements
Previously on “Underground Electric Loader”
In the previous episodes, we examined the current state of mining industry and electrification of mining machinery, presented the operational analysis of our system, and developed the strategy by identifying opportunities, brainstorming strategies and formalising development objectives.
In this episode, we kick off the concept development stage by discovering customer needs, transforming them into target requirements, and defining system functions.
Table of Contents:
Customer Needs
The goal of this step is to understand customers’ (mining companies and contractors) needs to effectively communicate them to the development team. Customer need statements are organized in a hierarchical list with importance weightings. Customer needs were derived from the open source research. The notable sources are Atlas Copco 2007, Sandvik 2022.
Interpreted needs are mostly solution neutral and not specific to the concept to be selected later. Customer statements and respective interpreted needs may belong to different categories, because a customer statement usually necessitates a wide-ranging set of conditions to be fulfilled.
Target Requirements
Requirements are a precise description of what a product has to do, i.e. a translation of customer needs into technical terms. At this stage, target requirements are, essentially, system requirements. In the later stages of the design life-cycle, physical component requirements are defined.
Ideally, requirements should be captured as a model in a PLM software, but because of our lack of experience with model-based requirements management, we captured the requirements in document-based format.
Target requirements listed here can ideally be traced at any later stage of development when defined through the PLM.
System Analysis
The objective of the second step of the MBSE Arcadia method is to allocate system functional needs to actors/entities on the system architecture. The system architecture answers the question “What the system needs to accomplish for users?”. The primary objective during this phase is to assess the feasibility of the identified customer requirements.
Only essential system functional needs — presented in green “SF” boxes inside the blue “OEAL” entity box — were captured in this system architecture. Such fidelity is enough for the project. However, a higher fidelity architecture made by a real system development team would include all functional needs found in the target requirements.
The system architecture is appropriate at this stage of project development as a communication and collaboration tool, but holds value primarily as a stepping stone towards next, more actionable architectures, namely logical and physical.
Conclusion
To finish up, in this episode, we have initiated the concept development stage by identifying customer needs, converting them into specific needs, and outlining the functions of the system in the system architecture.
In the next episode, we are continuing our concept development effort. We are going to define the logical architecture, generate concepts, and narrow down the selection of the finest one.
