A practical semantics for design facet interaction

Systems engineering is dominated by the need to integrate information from one design domain with information from another. Unfortunately, few requirements description languages support modeling heterogeneous requirements or modeling how those requirements interact. The paper describes the semantics of the Rosetta interaction specification capability (P. Alexander, 1998). The Rosetta interaction allows the user to explicitly define when and how specifications from multiple domains affect each other. Such interaction supports predictive analysis during the requirements specification and design life-cycle phases, thus reducing the cost of systems level information.