DODT: Increasing requirements formalism using domain ontologies for improved embedded systems development

Abstract

Abstract-In times of ever-growing system complexity and thus increasing possibilities for errors, high-quality requirements are crucial to prevent design errors in later project phases and to facilitate design verification and validation. To ensure and improve the consistency, completeness and correctness of requirements, formal languages have been introduced as an alternative to using natural language (NL) requirement descriptions. However, in many cases existing NL requirements must be taken into account. The formalization of those requirements by now is a primarily manual task, which therefore is both cumbersome and error-prone. We introduce the tool DODT that semi-automatically transforms NL requirements into semiformal boilerplate requirements. The transformation builds upon a domain ontology (DO) containing knowledge of the problem domain and upon natural language processing techniques. The tool strongly reduced the required manual effort for the transformation. In addition the quality of the requirements was improved.

Providing tool support for specifying safety-critical systems by enforcing syntactic contract conditions

“…In contrast to [23,27,44,50,51], but in accordance with the present paper, the works [2,3,28,29] describe formally founded support for RE. Similar to the present paper, the works [3,28] both focus on establishing trace links between requirements and design/architecture.…”

“…That is, in contrast to the present paper where support is provided by enforcing formal conditions, the works in [23,27,44] rely on natural language (NL) processing to provide feedback and guidance on requirements represented in NL considering, e.g., text length and terms usage with respect to a domain ontology/dictionary. Hence, while the approach in [23,27,44] improves readability of requirements, the approach in the present paper enforces their correctness, and thus, the approaches complement each other. NL processing is also used in [50,51] to automatically cluster and create trace links between requirements.…”

“…There are also other works [23,27,44] that focus on providing feedback-and/or guidance-driven tool support for specification, albeit with a fundamentally different approach from the present paper. That is, in contrast to the present paper where support is provided by enforcing formal conditions, the works in [23,27,44] rely on natural language (NL) processing to provide feedback and guidance on requirements represented in NL considering, e.g., text length and terms usage with respect to a domain ontology/dictionary.…”

“…However, the tool support in these approaches is dependent on that contracts must be formally represented in the language linear-time temporal logic (LTL) [59]. Despite the fact that formal representations have several advantages over non-formal ones, formal languages are difficult to use by non-experts [23] and in industrial practice, 'overcoming the burden of formalization is a major challenge' [10]. Therefore, instead of focusing on enforcing all of the contract conditions in [6,68,73,75,76], the present paper instead identifies necessary conditions of the formal interpretations of tasks (I)-(IV) where these conditions can be evaluated even when requirements and architectures are not represented formally; in the following, such necessary conditions will be called syntactic contract conditions.…”

Enforcing safety requirements for industrial automation systems at runtime position paper

“…Farfeleder et al [4] present an approach for representing the requirements of the systems. In this paper, they propose to use formal languages for requirements elicitation as an alternative to the natural language.…”