Escalating manpower costs in developing systems have caused an increasing need for greater productivity in systems development. This is particularly true in the requirements analysis and design phases. The ease with which new support environments can be created is increased through the use of a metasystem. Metasystems for defining and realizing computer-aided requirements specification environments are discussed. An introduction to metasystems that describes a basic system architecture and model of use is provided. The roles of the metasystem definer, specification environment definer and requirements analyst are discussed. An overview of the EARA (entity-attribute-relationship-aggregate) model in Metaview is given. The main focus of the paper is on modelling the specifications of requirements for real-time systems. Metasystems are also discussed in the context of consistency and completeness constraints. An illustrative set of constraints for the sample real-time systems environment is presented. The modelling of this environment gives an indication of the expressive power of Metaview's data model.
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