The E-ELT has completed its design phase and is now entering construction. ESO is acting as prime contractor and usually procures subsystems, including their design, from industry. This, in turn, leads to a large number of requirements, whose validity, consistency and conformity with user needs requires extensive management. Therefore E-ELT Systems Engineering has chosen to follow a systematic approach, based on a reasoned requirement architecture that follows the product breakdown structure of the observatory. The challenge ahead is the controlled flow-down of science user needs into engineering requirements, requirement specifications and system design documents. This paper shows how the E-ELT project manages this. The project has adopted IBM DOOR^TM as a supporting requirements management tool. This paper deals with emerging problems and pictures potential solutions. It shows trade-offs made to reach a proper balance between the effort put in this activity and potential overheads, and the benefit for the project.

Date Published: 4 August 2014
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 9150, Modeling, Systems Engineering, and Project Management for Astronomy VI, 915025 (4 August 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2055830

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9150:
Modeling, Systems Engineering, and Project Management for Astronomy VI
George Z. Angeli; Philippe Dierickx, Editor(s)