Abstract
Functional requirements (FRs) are derived from perceptions of needs expressed at workshops by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) organized to identify the requirements of SMEs to introduce Industry 4.0 in their company Rather than good expressions of customer needs (CNs), SME representatives often propose partial physical solutions, such as a robot, rather than basic needs, like orient and load parts. In Axiomatic Design (AD) the CNs are used to formulate FRs, which should be solution-neutral, to provide a large solution space, facilitating creativity and innovation in the design process. The workshops, as part of Horizons 2020 EU project, aimed to gain customer needs from SME's so that these needs could be researched and answered in future research These partial solutions proposed by the SMEs are analyzed in order to reverse engineer customer needs and functional requirements. These same reverse engineering methods also could be used to derive FRs from existing design solutions and could aid inexperienced designers who struggle to generate good, solution-neutral FRs that are appropriately devoid of physical attributes. Previous works are using a similar approach to taking the customers’ proposed partial solutions and reverse engineering the FRs and CNs.