Technical Requirements Ambiguity Checker

31 March 2021

As a spin-off of the European Space Operations Centre’s (ESOC) innovation cup, Solenix developed a technical requirements analysis tool for the European Space Agency (ESA). This tool, the Technical Requirements Ambiguity Checker (TRAC), analyses requirements documents for the use of ambiguous wording according to pre-defined keywords. The quality of technical requirements is defined by their clarity and completeness. A state-of-the-art machine-learning algorithm is used to extract requirement definitions from the documents, which are then subsequently checked for any occurrences of ambiguous words. In doing so, this tool helps document authors to write clearer and more concise requirement definitions.

The tool aims to be as user-friendly as possible. Users can upload their documents to a well-designed web application. At the click of a button, an analysis is started, followed by a presentation of results to the end user, listed per document. All requirements containing ambiguous wording are listed and occurrences of ambiguous use are highlighted. Results can be exported for sharing or for later review. In addition, users can tailor the list of ambiguous terms that the algorithm will detect.

All in all, using this tool allows to save significant amounts of time by helping the document review process with the provision of an overview of the parts in the documents requiring improvement.

Solenix is honoured to support ESOC’s efforts in optimising the document creation process with our expertise in machine-learning, web development and software engineering.