skip to main content
10.1145/3131151.3131175acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagessbesConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Specifying Safety Requirements with GORE languages

Published: 20 September 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Context: A suitable representation of Safety-Critical Systems (SCS) requirements is crucial to avoid misunderstandings in safety requirements and issues in safety specification. However, current general requirements specification languages do not fully support the particularities of specifying SCS. Objective: In this paper, our goal is to identify and propose a set of important features that should be provided by requirements languages to support an early safety requirements specification. Moreover, we aim to compare the ability of the four most used Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE) languages (i*, KAOS, GRL, NFR-Framework) in supporting the proposed features. Method: We first established a conceptual foundation and a conceptual model based on the literature, challenges elicited in previous works, and demands of safety standards at the requirements level that practitioners must satisfy in order to certify their systems. Results: We proposed a set of 15 features that requirements languages should provide to an early safety requirements specification. Regarding the comparison of GORE languages, in summary, all surveyed languages lacks explicit modeling constructs to express how hazards can occur in the system, the accidents, their impact and how they can mitigated. Conclusions: The conceptual foundation, conceptual model, and the set of features is a novelty. Finally, the features can be used to propose new requirements languages for SCS or to define extensions for the ones already available.

References

[1]
Luiz Eduardo G. Martins; Tony Gorschek. Requirements engineering for safety-critical systems: A systematic literature review. Information and Software Technology, v. 75, pp. 71--89, 2016.
[2]
Nancy Leveson. System safety and computers. Addison Wesley, 1995.
[3]
Luiz Eduardo G. Martins; Tiago de Oliveira. A case study using a protocol to derive safety functional requirements from fault tree analysis. In: Requirements Engineering Conference (RE), 2014 IEEE 22nd International. IEEE, 2014. pp. 412--419.
[4]
Luiz Eduardo G. Martins, Hanniere de Faria, Lucas Vecchete, Tatiana Cunha, Tiago de Oliveira, Dulce E. Casarini, and Juliana Almada Colucci. Development of a Low-Cost Insulin Infusion Pump: Lessons Learned from an Industry Case. In: Computer-Based Medical Systems (CBMS), 2015 IEEE 28th International Symposium on. IEEE, 2015. pp. 338--343.
[5]
Nancy Leveson. An approach to designing safe embedded software. In: International Workshop on Embedded Software. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2002. pp. 15--29.
[6]
Ben Swarup Medikonda;, Seetha Ramaiah Panchumarthy. A framework for software safety in safety-critical systems. ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, v. 34, n. 2, pp. 1--9, 2009.
[7]
Sven Scholz; Kleanthis Thramboulidis. Integration of model-based engineering with system safety analysis. International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering, v. 15, n. 2, pp. 193--215, 2013.
[8]
Jéssyka Vilela, Jaelson Castro, Luiz Eduardo G. Martins, and Tony Gorschek. Integration between requirements engineering and safety analysis: A systematic literature review. Journal of Systems and Software, v. 125, pp. 68--92, 2017.
[9]
Kleanthis Thramboulidis; Sven Scholz. Integrating the 3+ 1 SysML view model with safety engineering. In: Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA), 2010 IEEE Conference on. IEEE, 2010. pp. 1--8.
[10]
Gregory Zoughbi; Lionel Briand; Yvan Labiche. Modeling safety and airworthiness (RTCA DO-178B) information: conceptual model and UML profile. Software & Systems Modeling, v. 10, n. 3, pp. 337--367, 2011.
[11]
ISO, International Organization for Standardization. 61508 Functional safety of electrical/electronic/programmable electronic safety-related systems, International Electrotechnical Commission.
[12]
RTCA: Software Considerations in Airbone Systems and Equipment Certification. Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics (RTCA), European Organization for Civil Aviation Electronics (EUROCAE), Standard Document no. DO-178B/ED-12B, December 1992
[13]
Alexei Lapouchnian. Goal-oriented requirements engineering: An overview of the current research. University of Toronto, pp. 32, 2005.
[14]
Annie Anton. Goal-based requirements analysis. In: Requirements Engineering, 1996., Proceedings of the Second International Conference on. IEEE, 1996. p. 136--144.
[15]
Evangelia Kavakli; Pericles Loucopoulos. Goal driven requirements engineering: evaluation of current methods. In: Proceedings of the 8th CAiSE/IFIP8. 2003. pp. 16--17.
[16]
Jasen Markovski; J. M. Van de Mortel-Fronczak. Modeling for safety in a synthesis-centric systems engineering framework. In: International Conference on Computer Safety, Reliability, and Security. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2012. pp. 36--49.
[17]
Military Standard. System safety program requirements. MIL-STD-882C, US Department of Defense, USA, 1993.
[18]
U. S. Dod MIL-STD-882E, Department of Defense Standard Practice System Safety. US Department of Defense, 2012.
[19]
Jim Whitehead. Collaboration in Software Engineering: A Roadmap. In Future of Software Engineering (FOSE '07). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 2207, pp. 214--225.
[20]
Luiz Eduardo G. Martins; Tony Gorschek. Requirements Engineering for Safety-Critical Systems: Overview and Challenges. Accepted for publication. In: IEEE Software, 2017. For a copy: [email protected].
[21]
Jennifer Horkoff, Tong Li, Feng-Lin Li, Mattia Salnitri, Evellin Cardoso, Paolo Giorgini, John Mylopoulos, and Joao Pimentel. Taking goal models downstream: a systematic roadmap. In: Eighth International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS), 2014. pp. 1--12.
[22]
Jaelson Castro; Manuel Kolp; John Mylopoulos. A requirements-driven development methodology. In: International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2001. pp. 108--123.
[23]
S. K Eric. Social modeling for requirements engineering. Mit Press, 2011.
[24]
Anne Dardenne; Axel Van Lamsweerde; Stephen Fickas. Goal-directed requirements acquisition. Science of computer programming, v. 20, n. 1-2, pp. 3--50, 1993.
[25]
John Mylopoulos; Lawrence Chung; Brian Nixon. Representing and using nonfunctional requirements: A process-oriented approach. IEEE Transactions on software engineering, v. 18, n. 6, pp. 483--497, 1992.
[26]
Daniel Amyot; Gunter Mussbacher. Development of Telecommunications Standards and Services with the User Requirements Notation. In: Workshop on ITU System Design Languages, 2008.
[27]
John Hatcliff, Alan Wassyng, Tim Kelly, Cyrille Comar, and Paul Jones. Certifiably safe software-dependent systems: challenges and directions. In: Proceedings of the on Future of Software Engineering. ACM, 2014. pp. 182--200.
[28]
Claes Wohlin, Per Runeson, Martin Höst, Magnus C. Ohlsson, Björn Regnell, and Anders Wesslén. Experimentation in software engineering. Springer Science & Business Media, 2012.
[29]
Nancy Leveson. System safety and computers. Addison Wesley, 1995.
[30]
Alan Simpson; Joanne Stoker. Will it be Safe?---An Approach to Engineering Safety Requirements. In: Components of System Safety. Springer London, 2002. pp. 140--164.
[31]
Javier Fernández Briones, Miguel Ángel De Miguel, Juan Pedro Silva, and Alejandro Alonso. Application of safety analyses in model driven development. Software Technologies for Embedded and Ubiquitous Systems, p. 93--104, 2007.
[32]
Samuel Fricker; Tony Gorschek; Martin Glinz. Goal-oriented requirements communication in new product development. In: Second International Workshop on Software Product Management, IWSPM'08, 2008. pp. 27--34.
[33]
Ernst Sikora; Bastian Tenbergen; Klaus Pohl. Industry needs and research directions in requirements engineering for embedded systems. In: Requirements Engineering, v. 17, n. 1, pp. 57--78, 2012.
[34]
Martin Glinz; Samuel A. Fricker. On shared understanding in software engineering: an essay. Computer Science-Research and Development, v. 30, n. 3--4, pp. 363--376, 2015.
[35]
Barbara Paech,; Jorg Dorr; Mathias Koehler. Improving requirements engineering communication in multiproject environments. IEEE software, v. 22, n. 1, pp. 40--47, 2005.
[36]
Sultan Aljahdali; Jameela Bano; Nisar Hundewale. Goal Oriented Requirements Engineering-A Review. In: 24th International Conference on Computer Applications in Industry and Engineering, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, CAINE. 2011. pp. 16--18.
[37]
Sadaf Mustafiz; Jörg Kienzle. DREP: A requirements engineering process for dependable reactive systems. In: Methods, Models and Tools for Fault Tolerance. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2009. p. 220--250.
[38]
Geoffrey Biggs; Takeshi Sakamoto; Tetsuo Kotoku. A profile and tool for modelling safety information with design information in SysML. Software & Systems Modeling, v. 15, n. 1, p. 147--178, 2016.
[39]
Samuel Fricker, Tony Gorschek, Carl Byman, Armin Schmidle. Handshaking with implementation proposals: Negotiating requirements understanding. IEEE software, v. 27, n. 2, p. 72, 2010.
[40]
Monique Soares; Jéssyka Vilela; Gabriela Guedes; Carla Silva; Jaelson Castro. Core Ontology to Aid the Goal Oriented Specification for Self-Adaptive Systems. In: New Advances in Information Systems and Technologies. Springer International Publishing, 2016. pp. 609--618.
[41]
Milena Guessi; Everton Cavalcante; Lucas Oliveira. Characterizing architecture description languages for software-intensive systems-of-systems. In: Proceedings of the third international workshop on software engineering for systems-of-systems. IEEE Press, 2015. pp. 12--18.
[42]
Rajiv Murali; Andrew Ireland; Gudmund Grov. A rigorous approach to combining use case modelling and accident scenarios. In: NASA Formal Methods Symposium. Springer International Publishing, 2015. pp. 263--278.
[43]
Romaric Guillerm; Hamid Demmou; Nabil Sadou. Information model for model driven safety requirements management of complex systems. In: Complex Systems Design & Management. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2010. pp. 99--111.
[44]
Vivek Ratan, Kurt Partridge, Jon Reese, and Nancy Leveson. Safety analysis tools for requirements specifications. In: Computer Assurance, 1996. COMPASS'96, Systems Integrity. Software Safety. Process Security. Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Conference on. IEEE, 1996. pp. 149--160.
[45]
Joakim Pernstål, Tony Gorschek, Robert Feldt, and Dan Florén. Requirements communication and balancing in large-scale software-intensive product development. Information and Software Technology, v. 67, pp. 44--64, 2015.
[46]
Jennifer Horkoff; Eric Yu. Analyzing goal models: different approaches and how to choose among them. In: Proceedings of the 2011 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing. ACM, 2011. pp. 675--682.
[47]
Nancy Leveson. Engineering a Safer World: Systems Thinking Applied to Safety. Mit Press, 2011
[48]
Nancy Leveson. Safeware: System Safety and Computers. ACM, 1995.
[49]
Paulo Lima, Jéssyka Vilela, Enyo Gonçalves, João Pimentel, Ana Holanda, Jaelson Castro, Fernanda Alencar, Maria Lencastre. Scalability of iStar: a Systematic Mapping Study. In: Proceeding of Workshop of Engenharia de Requisitos (WER), 2016.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)A Review of Non-Functional Requirements Analysis Throughout the SDLCComputers10.3390/computers1312030813:12(308)Online publication date: 23-Nov-2024
  • (2024)Goal-Oriented Modeling of Safety-Critical SystemsSocial Modeling Using the i* Framework10.1007/978-3-031-72107-6_7(101-117)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2024
  • (2021)Formal requirements modeling for cyber-physical systems engineering: an integrated solution based on FORM-L and ModelicaRequirements Engineering10.1007/s00766-021-00359-z27:1(1-30)Online publication date: 14-Aug-2021
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
SBES '17: Proceedings of the XXXI Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering
September 2017
409 pages
ISBN:9781450353267
DOI:10.1145/3131151
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

In-Cooperation

  • SBC: Brazilian Computer Society
  • CNPq: Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientifico e Tecn
  • CAPES: Brazilian Higher Education Funding Council

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 20 September 2017

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. Goal-oriented requirements engineering
  2. Goal-oriented requirements languages
  3. Requirements engineering
  4. Safety analysis
  5. Safety engineering
  6. Safety-critical systems

Qualifiers

  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

Conference

SBES'17
SBES'17: 31st Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering
September 20 - 22, 2017
CE, Fortaleza, Brazil

Acceptance Rates

SBES '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 42 of 134 submissions, 31%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 147 of 427 submissions, 34%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)11
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1
Reflects downloads up to 12 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)A Review of Non-Functional Requirements Analysis Throughout the SDLCComputers10.3390/computers1312030813:12(308)Online publication date: 23-Nov-2024
  • (2024)Goal-Oriented Modeling of Safety-Critical SystemsSocial Modeling Using the i* Framework10.1007/978-3-031-72107-6_7(101-117)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2024
  • (2021)Formal requirements modeling for cyber-physical systems engineering: an integrated solution based on FORM-L and ModelicaRequirements Engineering10.1007/s00766-021-00359-z27:1(1-30)Online publication date: 14-Aug-2021
  • (2018)Specifying privacy requirements with goal-oriented modeling languagesProceedings of the XXXII Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering10.1145/3266237.3266270(112-121)Online publication date: 17-Sep-2018
  • (2018)Safe-REProceedings of the XXXII Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering10.1145/3266237.3266242(196-201)Online publication date: 17-Sep-2018

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media