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Requirements that are understood and shared by all stakeholders as well as system engineers are highly critical in the development of a successful system. Natural languages (NL) are essentially preferred to represent requirements to advance this shared understanding. However, natural languages are inherently imprecise and ambiguous leading to inconsistent, incomplete, and incorrect requirements. Therefore, there is a need to represent requirements formally. In this paper, the use of ontologies for knowledge representation from requirements is presented for the responsive and formal design (RFD) process. The main goals are to (1) facilitate requirements engineering, (2) serve as an intermediate representation for automatic transition to logic-based modeling, and (3) formalize the process of transformation from requirements to logic-based modeling. Therefore, requirements engineering in the RFD process will be augmented using ontologies in the domain modeling of the system to be implemented. Ontologies are utilized to capture domain requirements, and formal mechanisms are used to check for inconsistency and incompleteness at each abstraction layer in the RFD process.

The goal of this paper is to explore the need for Systems Engineering (SE) in East African countries and how best to educate engineers in the field of SE. It provides a comprehensive overview on the usefulness of SE education for East African nations and proposes SE curriculum. Presently SE has been given little attention in East African countries. However, these countries are in the beginning of industrialization with many new mega projects and infrastructure expansions that demands SE professionals. This motivates the need to introduce SE education in the region. Systems engineering education demands the development of SE curriculum, which will be multidisciplinary and considers social and psychological factors by taking into account the active participation of the community. Towards this end, the paper demonstrates the necessity of SE education via designing and managing ongoing mega projects. It also proposes SE curriculum by incorporating courses covering both foundations of SE and the practice of SE. Furthermore, it suggests that these courses will be delivered in collaboration with industry and government entities.

This chapter introduces an application of small satellite for environmental monitoring using real-time data that focuses on measured soil moisture and temperature using in situ sensor network. Soil Moisture Active Passive Mission (SMAP) uses microwave radar and radiometer to sense surface soil moisture condition but gives coarser result than the in situ data. To overcome the limitation of accuracy in SMAP mission, the proposed architecture will provide sensor data via a Ground Monitoring Wireless Sensor Network (GM-WSN) where data is collected by small satellite(s) operating in Lower Earth Orbit (LEO). The satellite will store the data until it passes over a ground station whereby it is communicated back to earth. The motivation for developing satellite accessible in situ measurements is to retrieve information from remote areas like Lake Tana in Ethiopia, where human accessibility is difficult. Hence, those important and unattended places would be covered by the proposed system. Another key attribute of this architecture is that it addresses four (climate, carbon, weather, and water) out of six NASA’s earth science strategic focus areas. The GM-WSN will consist of a sensor network that will measure soil moisture and temperature. The base station function is to fuse the data from the sensors, provide a time stamp, and format the data to be transmitted to satellite. It will also act as transceiver for ground to space communication using the amateur VHF/UHF radio band that has a maximum data rate of 9.6 kbps and will provide health maintenance and power management of network.