on March 13, 2025 at 2:00 pm
Crafting Safety: When Models Meet Templates for Software Requirements Specification
In this talk, we will discuss some challenges encountered by software manufacturers who build safety-critical and certifiable software. We will focus on the challenge of specifying and verifying requirements. For safety-critical software, a large number of requirements must be specified, verified and managed: and many of these requirements result from large sets of guidelines embodied in some standards. For instance, a real-time operating system for avionics must comply with both DO178C and ARINC653. Also, most safety-critical software manufacturers are using natural language to specify requirements, which is prone to ambiguity and inconsistency, and does not enable automatic analysis. Thus, requirements specification and verification of safety-critical software are resource-consuming and error-prone. Inour research, we leverage model-driven engineering (MDE) and Controlled-Natural language (CNL) techniques to tackle these challenges. We proposed and implemented an approach that combines MDE and CNL to model requirements templates that support and constrain the specification of requirements. Our approach relies on: 1) a unified language (UTL) that enables the creation, implementation and evolution of requirements templates; 2) mappings between the requirements templates and domain models to support, to some extent, requirements verification and auto-filling; a systematic process for the creation of templates and 4) a tool chain that enables the creation of templates using UTL and their use for requirements specification. Empirical evaluations of our approach were carried out through several case studies and user studies involving an industrial partner.
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