Successful disputation by Lisa Ritter

Congratulations to Dr. Lisa Ritter, who defended her dissertation entitled "Method of requirements management for variant avoidance in the early phase of product development" at the Department of Quality and Process Management.

The main aim of Lisa Ritter's dissertation was to support the reuse of requirements from component specifications by developing an automated method for structuring the requirements to build a requirements library that also makes the differences in the requirements transparent.

This is because customer-oriented product development is important if a product is to be successful on the market. At the same time, the requirements placed on a product are becoming more diverse. A common approach to dealing with the large volume of requirements is unstructured reuse by copying individual requirements or even entire requirements documents.

The method she has developed uses the semantic folding approach from the field of natural language processing (NLP) to automatically compare the content of requirements with one another. Using the example of component specifications from chassis development, it is shown that the automated method correctly identifies 92.3% of the requirements as similar or different in terms of content. As a result, differences in the requirements can be specifically scrutinized by the developers and, if possible, standardized.

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Robert Refflinghaus and the examination committee would like to congratulate Ms. Ritter once again on her successful dissertation and wish her all the best for the future, especially in her new role in the Assembly Planning Control department at Rolls Royce!