{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,6,1]],"date-time":"2026-06-01T14:19:11Z","timestamp":1780323551570,"version":"3.54.1"},"reference-count":39,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"7","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2023,7,10]],"date-time":"2023-07-10T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1688947200000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Systems"],"abstract":"<jats:p>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).<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/systems11070352","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2023,7,11]],"date-time":"2023-07-11T01:42:58Z","timestamp":1689039778000},"page":"352","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":27,"title":["Agile Methodology for the Standardization of Engineering Requirements Using Large Language Models"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"11","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-3400-9014","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Archana","family":"Tikayat Ray","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory, School of Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-1458-0555","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Bjorn F.","family":"Cole","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Lockheed Martin Space, Littleton, CO 80127, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-2233-1391","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Olivia J.","family":"Pinon Fischer","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory, School of Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0001-2754-2745","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Anirudh Prabhakara","family":"Bhat","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Amazon, Toronto, ON M5H 4A9, Canada"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-5524-629X","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Ryan T.","family":"White","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Neural Transmissions Laboratory, Department of Mathematical Sciences, Florida Institute of Technology, Melbourne, FL 32901, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Dimitri N.","family":"Mavris","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory, School of Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2023,7,10]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","unstructured":"INCOSE (2020). Guide to the Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge, INCOSE. BKCASE Editorial Board."},{"key":"ref_2","unstructured":"INCOSE (2023, January 10). INCOSE INFRASTRUCTURE WORKING GROUP Charter. pp. 3\u20135. Available online: https:\/\/www.incose.org\/docs\/default-source\/wgcharters\/infrastructure.pdf?sfvrsn=9e0eb2c6_18."},{"key":"ref_3","unstructured":"NASA (2023, January 05). Appendix C: How to Write a Good Requirement. pp. 115\u2013119, Available online: https:\/\/www.nasa.gov\/seh\/appendix-c-how-to-write-a-good-requirement."},{"key":"ref_4","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Regnell, B., Svensson, R.B., and Wnuk, K. (2008, January 16\u201317). Can we beat the complexity of very large-scale requirements engineering?. Proceedings of the International Working Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality, Montpellier, France.","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-540-69062-7_11"},{"key":"ref_5","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"17","DOI":"10.5381\/jot.2007.6.1.c2","article-title":"Common Requirements Problems, Their Negative Consequences, and the Industry Best Practices to Help Solve Them","volume":"6","author":"Firesmith","year":"2007","journal-title":"J. Object Technol."},{"key":"ref_6","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1723","DOI":"10.1002\/j.2334-5837.2004.tb00608.x","article-title":"8.4. 2 error cost escalation through the project life cycle","volume":"14","author":"Haskins","year":"2004","journal-title":"INCOSE Int. Symp."},{"key":"ref_7","unstructured":"Bell, T.E., and Thayer, T.A. (1976, January 13\u201315). Software requirements: Are they really a problem?. Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Software Engineering, San Francisco, CA, USA."},{"key":"ref_8","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Tikayat Ray, A., Pinon Fischer, O.J., Mavris, D.N., White, R.T., and Cole, B.F. (2023, January 23\u201327). aeroBERT-NER: Named-Entity Recognition for Aerospace Requirements Engineering using BERT. Proceedings of the AIAA SCITECH 2023 Forum, National Harbor, MD, USA.","DOI":"10.2514\/6.2023-2583"},{"key":"ref_9","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Tikayat Ray, A., Cole, B.F., Pinon Fischer, O.J., White, R.T., and Mavris, D.N. (2023). aeroBERT-Classifier: Classification of Aerospace Requirements Using BERT. Aerospace, 10.","DOI":"10.20944\/preprints202302.0077.v1"},{"key":"ref_10","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Tikayat Ray, A. (2023). Standardization of Engineering Requirements Using Large Language Models. [Ph.D. Thesis, Georgia Institute of Technology].","DOI":"10.20944\/preprints202305.1325.v1"},{"key":"ref_11","unstructured":"Akbik, A., Blythe, D., and Vollgraf, R. (2018, January 20\u201326). Contextual String Embeddings for Sequence Labeling. Proceedings of the COLING 2018, 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Santa Fe, NM, USA."},{"key":"ref_12","first-page":"1","article-title":"Survey of model-based systems engineering (MBSE) methodologies","volume":"25","author":"Estefan","year":"2007","journal-title":"INCOSE MBSE Focus Group"},{"key":"ref_13","unstructured":"Jacobson, L., and Booch, J.R.G. (2021). The Unified Modeling Language Reference Manual, Addison-Wesley."},{"key":"ref_14","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Ballard, M., Peak, R., Cimtalay, S., and Mavris, D.N. (2020, January 7\u201314). Bidirectional Text-to-Model Element Requirement Transformation. In Proccedings of the IEEE Aerospace Conference, Big Sky, MT, USA.","DOI":"10.1109\/AERO47225.2020.9172306"},{"key":"ref_15","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"7260","DOI":"10.1016\/j.ifacol.2017.08.1376","article-title":"An MBSE approach to pass from requirements to functional architecture","volume":"50","author":"Lemazurier","year":"2017","journal-title":"IFAC-PapersOnLine"},{"key":"ref_16","unstructured":"INCOSE (2022). Needs, Requirements, Verification, Validation Lifecycle Manual, INCOSE. BKCASE Editorial Board."},{"key":"ref_17","unstructured":"(2023, February 10). Requirement Table. Available online: https:\/\/docs.nomagic.com\/display\/SYSMLP182\/Requirement+Table."},{"key":"ref_18","unstructured":"(2023, February 10). Modeling Requirements with SysML. Available online: https:\/\/re-magazine.ireb.org\/articles\/modeling-requirements-with-sysml."},{"key":"ref_19","unstructured":"Rupp, C. (2007). Requirements-Engineering und-Management: Professionelle, Iterative Anforderungsanalyse f\u00fcr die Praxis, Hanser Verlag."},{"key":"ref_20","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"3","DOI":"10.5753\/jserd.2020.473","article-title":"Towards a new template for the specification of requirements in semi-structured natural language","volume":"8","author":"Vallejo","year":"2020","journal-title":"J. Softw. Eng. Res. Dev."},{"key":"ref_21","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Mavin, A., Wilkinson, P., Harwood, A., and Novak, M. (September, January 31). Easy approach to requirements syntax (EARS). Proceedings of the 2009 17th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, Atlanta, GA, USA.","DOI":"10.1109\/RE.2009.9"},{"key":"ref_22","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"28","DOI":"10.1109\/MS.2017.4121207","article-title":"Natural Language Requirements Processing: A 4D Vision","volume":"34","author":"Ferrari","year":"2017","journal-title":"IEEE Softw."},{"key":"ref_23","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"297","DOI":"10.1016\/0164-1212(81)90004-2","article-title":"Software requirements and specifications: A survey of needs and languages","volume":"2","author":"Abbott","year":"1981","journal-title":"J. Syst. Softw."},{"key":"ref_24","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"115","DOI":"10.1109\/MS.2018.3571242","article-title":"Natural language processing for requirements engineering: The best is yet to come","volume":"35","author":"Dalpiaz","year":"2018","journal-title":"IEEE Softw."},{"key":"ref_25","first-page":"1","article-title":"Natural language processing for requirements engineering: A systematic mapping study","volume":"54","author":"Zhao","year":"2021","journal-title":"ACM Comput. Surv."},{"key":"ref_26","unstructured":"Leen, T., Dietterich, T., and Tresp, V. (2000). Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, MIT Press."},{"key":"ref_27","unstructured":"Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A.N., Kaiser, \u0141., and Polosukhin, I. (2017). Attention is all you need. Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst., 30."},{"key":"ref_28","unstructured":"Devlin, J., Chang, M.W., Lee, K., and Toutanova, K. (2019). BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding. arXiv."},{"key":"ref_29","first-page":"1","article-title":"Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer","volume":"21","author":"Raffel","year":"2020","journal-title":"J. Mach. Learn. Res."},{"key":"ref_30","first-page":"9","article-title":"Language models are unsupervised multitask learners","volume":"1","author":"Radford","year":"2019","journal-title":"OpenAI Blog"},{"key":"ref_31","first-page":"1877","article-title":"Language Models are Few-Shot Learners","volume":"Volume 33","author":"Larochelle","year":"2020","journal-title":"Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems"},{"key":"ref_32","unstructured":"(2023, January 10). Hugging Face. Available online: https:\/\/huggingface.co\/."},{"key":"ref_33","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Dalpiaz, F., Dell\u2019Anna, D., Aydemir, F.B., and \u00c7evikol, S. (2019, January 23\u201327). Requirements Classification with Interpretable Machine Learning and Dependency Parsing. Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE 27th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE), Jeju, Republic of Korea.","DOI":"10.1109\/RE.2019.00025"},{"key":"ref_34","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"62811","DOI":"10.1109\/ACCESS.2022.3182372","article-title":"The Use of NLP-Based Text Representation Techniques to Support Requirement Engineering Tasks: A Systematic Mapping Review","volume":"10","author":"Sonbol","year":"2022","journal-title":"IEEE Access"},{"key":"ref_35","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"806","DOI":"10.1002\/j.2334-5837.2021.00871.x","article-title":"Application of natural language processing for systematic requirement management in model-based systems engineering","volume":"31","author":"Riesener","year":"2021","journal-title":"INCOSE Int. Symp."},{"key":"ref_36","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Arora, C., Sabetzadeh, M., Briand, L., Zimmer, F., and Gnaga, R. (2013, January 10\u201311). Automatic checking of conformance to requirement boilerplates via text chunking: An industrial case study. Proceedings of the 2013 ACM\/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, Baltimore, MD, USA.","DOI":"10.1109\/ESEM.2013.13"},{"key":"ref_37","unstructured":"Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) (2023). Title 14 Code of Federal Regulations, FAR."},{"key":"ref_38","unstructured":"Jurafsky, D., and Martin, J.H. (2021). Speech and Language Processing (Draft), Stanford University."},{"key":"ref_39","unstructured":"(2023, February 21). Syntax. Available online: https:\/\/webspace.ship.edu\/cgboer\/syntax.html."}],"container-title":["Systems"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/2079-8954\/11\/7\/352\/pdf","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,10]],"date-time":"2025-10-10T20:09:56Z","timestamp":1760126996000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/2079-8954\/11\/7\/352"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2023,7,10]]},"references-count":39,"journal-issue":{"issue":"7","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2023,7]]}},"alternative-id":["systems11070352"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/systems11070352","relation":{},"ISSN":["2079-8954"],"issn-type":[{"value":"2079-8954","type":"electronic"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2023,7,10]]}}}