Early Requirements Validation with 3D Worlds

It is a well-known fact the real significance of correctly determining requirements of a system at the very beginning of the development process. Indeed, experience demonstrates that the incorrect definition of requirements leads to development of deficient systems, increases the cost of its development or even causes projects to fail. Thus, it is crucial for clients to verify that the planned system satisfies their needs. In order to help users in the process of requirements understanding and validation this work proposes using 3D visualization techniques. The use of these techniques can reduce the communication gap between clients and developers resulting in a much more effective process of requirements validation. The approach tries to take advantage of the benefits of the 3D visualization, complementing this with the advantages of formal specifications. The approach proposes the use of formal specifications in a lighter way. This means that no formal reasoning (theorem proving) is carried out to check the properties of the specified system and the emphasis is focused on the execution and animation of the specification for early validation. A prototype tool that materializes the proposal was developed. The tool allows specifying the requirements in the formal language Z, defining a graphical representation of them and creating a 3D animated visualization of their execution through which the users can validate them.Fil: Teyseyre, Alfredo Raul. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software; ArgentinaFil: Campo, Marcelo Ricardo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software; Argentin

A Static Verification Framework for Secure Peer-to-Peer Applications

In this paper we present a static verification framework to support the design and verification of secure peer-to-peer applications. The framework supports the specification, modeling, and analysis of security aspects together with the general characteristics of the system, during early stages of the development life-cycle. The approach avoids security issues to be taken into consideration as a separate layer that is added to the system as an afterthought by the use of security protocols. The main functionality supported by the framework are concerned with the modeling of the system together with its security aspects by using an extension of UML, modeling of abuse cases to represent scenarios of attackers and assist with the identification of properties to be verified, specification of properties to be verified in a graphical template language, verification of the models against the properties, and visualization of the results of the verification process

ViSpec: A graphical tool for elicitation of MTL requirements

One of the main barriers preventing widespread use of formal methods is the elicitation of formal specifications. Formal specifications facilitate the testing and verification process for safety critical robotic systems. However, handling the intricacies of formal languages is difficult and requires a high level of expertise in formal logics that many system developers do not have. In this work, we present a graphical tool designed for the development and visualization of formal specifications by people that do not have training in formal logic. The tool enables users to develop specifications using a graphical formalism which is then automatically translated to Metric Temporal Logic (MTL). In order to evaluate the effectiveness of our tool, we have also designed and conducted a usability study with cohorts from the academic student community and industry. Our results indicate that both groups were able to define formal requirements with high levels of accuracy. Finally, we present applications of our tool for defining specifications for operation of robotic surgery and autonomous quadcopter safe operation.Comment: Technical report for the paper to be published in the 2015 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems held in Hamburg, Germany. Includes 10 pages and 19 figure

Cyber-Virtual Systems: Simulation, Validation & Visualization

We describe our ongoing work and view on simulation, validation and visualization of cyber-physical systems in industrial automation during development, operation and maintenance. System models may represent an existing physical part - for example an existing robot installation - and a software simulated part - for example a possible future extension. We call such systems cyber-virtual systems. In this paper, we present the existing VITELab infrastructure for visualization tasks in industrial automation. The new methodology for simulation and validation motivated in this paper integrates this infrastructure. We are targeting scenarios, where industrial sites which may be in remote locations are modeled and visualized from different sites anywhere in the world. Complementing the visualization work, here, we are also concentrating on software modeling challenges related to cyber-virtual systems and simulation, testing, validation and verification techniques for them. Software models of industrial sites require behavioural models of the components of the industrial sites such as models for tools, robots, workpieces and other machinery as well as communication and sensor facilities. Furthermore, collaboration between sites is an important goal of our work.Comment: Preprint, 9th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering (ENASE 2014

The Need to Support of Data Flow Graph Visualization of Forensic Lucid Programs, Forensic Evidence, and their Evaluation by GIPSY

Lucid programs are data-flow programs and can be visually represented as data flow graphs (DFGs) and composed visually. Forensic Lucid, a Lucid dialect, is a language to specify and reason about cyberforensic cases. It includes the encoding of the evidence (representing the context of evaluation) and the crime scene modeling in order to validate claims against the model and perform event reconstruction, potentially within large swaths of digital evidence. To aid investigators to model the scene and evaluate it, instead of typing a Forensic Lucid program, we propose to expand the design and implementation of the Lucid DFG programming onto Forensic Lucid case modeling and specification to enhance the usability of the language and the system and its behavior. We briefly discuss the related work on visual programming an DFG modeling in an attempt to define and select one approach or a composition of approaches for Forensic Lucid based on various criteria such as previous implementation, wide use, formal backing in terms of semantics and translation. In the end, we solicit the readers' constructive, opinions, feedback, comments, and recommendations within the context of this short discussion.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, index; extended abstract presented at VizSec'10 at http://www.vizsec2010.org/posters ; short paper accepted at PST'1

Requirements of Modern Genome Browsers

Genome browsers are widely used tools for the visualization of a genome and related data. The demands placed on genome browsers due to the size, variety, and complexity of the data produced by modern biotechnology is increasing. These demands are poorly understood, and are not documented. Our study is establishing and documenting a clear set of requirements for genome browsers. Our study reviewed all widely used genome browsers, as well as notable research prototypes of genome browsers. This involved a review of the literature, executing typical uses of the genome browsers, program comprehension, reverse engineering, and code analysis. The key outcome of the study is a clear set of requirements in the form of a requirement document which conforms to the IEEE Std 830-1998 Standard of a Software Requirement Specification. This contains a domain model of concepts, the functional requirements as use cases, a definition of visualizations as metaphors, glyphs, or icons, formal specification of the system in Z notation and a specification of all widely used file formats. Genome browsers share a set of basic features like display, scroll, zoom, and search. However, they differ in their performance, maturity level and the implementation technologies. Our requirements also document the major non-functional requirements. The outcome of our study can be used in several ways: it can be used as a guide for future developers of Genome Browsers; it can form the basis of future enhancements of features in existing genome browsers; and it can motivate the invention of new algorithms, data structures, or file formats for implementations

Towards a Formal Model of Privacy-Sensitive Dynamic Coalitions

The concept of dynamic coalitions (also virtual organizations) describes the temporary interconnection of autonomous agents, who share information or resources in order to achieve a common goal. Through modern technologies these coalitions may form across company, organization and system borders. Therefor questions of access control and security are of vital significance for the architectures supporting these coalitions. In this paper, we present our first steps to reach a formal framework for modeling and verifying the design of privacy-sensitive dynamic coalition infrastructures and their processes. In order to do so we extend existing dynamic coalition modeling approaches with an access-control-concept, which manages access to information through policies. Furthermore we regard the processes underlying these coalitions and present first works in formalizing these processes. As a result of the present paper we illustrate the usefulness of the Abstract State Machine (ASM) method for this task. We demonstrate a formal treatment of privacy-sensitive dynamic coalitions by two example ASMs which model certain access control situations. A logical consideration of these ASMs can lead to a better understanding and a verification of the ASMs according to the aspired specification.Comment: In Proceedings FAVO 2011, arXiv:1204.579

The VAT tool : automatic transformation of VHDL to timed automata

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 61-66).Embedded systems have become an integral part of the systems we use today. These types of systems are constrained by both stringent time requirements and limited resource availability. Traditionally, high-integrity embedded systems operated on well understood hardware platforms. The emergence of inexpensive FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) and ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) as operational platforms for embedded software, has resulted in the system developer having to verify both the hardware and the software components. The stringent processes used over the system development lifecycle have to be augmented to account for this paradigm shift. One possible approach is to create a homogenous formal model that accounts for both the hardware and the software components of the system. This thesis focuses on making a contribution to the extraction of formal models from the VHDL specification of the operational platform. The research underlying this thesis was driven by the goals of: a) augmenting the system developer's verification and validation toolbox with a powerful yet easy-to-use tool; b) developing a tool that is modular, extensible, and adaptable to changing customer requirements; c) providing a transparent transformation process, which can be leveraged by both academia and industry. The thesis discusses in detail, the design and development of the VAT tool, that transforms VHDL specifications into finite state machines. It discusses the use of model checking on the extracted formal model and presents a visualization technique that enables manual inspection of the formal model.by Carl Nehme.S.M

Semantics of trace relations in requirements models for consistency checking and inferencing

Requirements traceability is the ability to relate requirements back to stakeholders and forward to corresponding design artifacts, code, and test cases. Although considerable research has been devoted to relating requirements in both forward and backward directions, less attention has been paid to relating requirements with other requirements. Relations between requirements influence a number of activities during software development such as consistency checking and change management. In most approaches and tools, there is a lack of precise definition of requirements relations. In this respect, deficient results may be produced. In this paper, we aim at formal definitions of the relation types in order to enable reasoning about requirements relations. We give a requirements metamodel with commonly used relation types. The semantics of the relations is provided with a formalization in first-order logic. We use the formalization for consistency checking of relations and for inferring new relations. A tool has been built to support both reasoning activities. We illustrate our approach in an example which shows that the formal semantics of relation types enables new relations to be inferred and contradicting relations in requirements documents to be determined. The application of requirements reasoning based on formal semantics resolves many of the deficiencies observed in other approaches. Our tool supports better understanding of dependencies between requirements