Abstract
[Context & Motivation] Requirements specification and analysis is widely applied to ensure the correctness of industrial systems in safety critical domains. Requirements are often initially written in natural language, which is highly ambiguous, and as a second step transformed into a language with rigorous semantics for formal analysis. [Question/problem] In this paper, we report on our experience in requirements creation and analysis, as well as run-time monitor generation using the Formal Requirement Elicitation Tool (FRET), on an industrial case study for a Lift-Plus-Cruise concept aircraft. [Principal ideas/results] We study the creation of requirements directly in the structured language of FRET without a prior definition of the same requirements in natural language. We focus on requirements describing state machines and discuss the challenges that we faced, in terms of creating requirements and generating monitors. We demonstrate how realizability, i.e., checking whether a requirements specification can be implemented, is crucial for understanding temporal interdependencies among requirements. [Contribution] Our study is the first complete attempt at using FRET to create industrial, realizable requirements and generate run-time monitors. Insight from lessons learned was materialized into new features in the FRET and JKind analysis frameworks.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge Michael Feary, John Kanishige, and Kimberlee Shish who explained the vehicle used in this study and provided Fig. 2, and Dimitra Giannakopoulou who did an early requirements development. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers who provided detailed improvement suggestions. This work was supported by the Advanced Air Mobility and System Wide Safety projects in the NASA Aeronautics Mission Directorate’s Airspace Operations and Safety Program. Andreas Katis and Anastasia Mavridou were supported by contract NASA 80ARC020D0010.
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Pressburger, T., Katis, A., Dutle, A., Mavridou, A. (2023). Authoring, Analyzing, and Monitoring Requirements for a Lift-Plus-Cruise Aircraft. In: Ferrari, A., Penzenstadler, B. (eds) Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality. REFSQ 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13975. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29786-1_21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29786-1_21
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