43,957 research outputs found
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
Towards a Formalism-Based Toolkit for Automotive Applications
The success of a number of projects has been shown to be significantly
improved by the use of a formalism. However, there remains an open issue: to
what extent can a development process based on a singular formal notation and
method succeed. The majority of approaches demonstrate a low level of
flexibility by attempting to use a single notation to express all of the
different aspects encountered in software development. Often, these approaches
leave a number of scalability issues open. We prefer a more eclectic approach.
In our experience, the use of a formalism-based toolkit with adequate notations
for each development phase is a viable solution. Following this principle, any
specific notation is used only where and when it is really suitable and not
necessarily over the entire software lifecycle. The approach explored in this
article is perhaps slowly emerging in practice - we hope to accelerate its
adoption. However, the major challenge is still finding the best way to
instantiate it for each specific application scenario. In this work, we
describe a development process and method for automotive applications which
consists of five phases. The process recognizes the need for having adequate
(and tailored) notations (Problem Frames, Requirements State Machine Language,
and Event-B) for each development phase as well as direct traceability between
the documents produced during each phase. This allows for a stepwise
verification/validation of the system under development. The ideas for the
formal development method have evolved over two significant case studies
carried out in the DEPLOY project
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Actor perception in business use case modeling
Mainstream literature recognizes the validity and effectiveness of use cases as a technique for gathering and capturing system requirements. Use cases represent the driver of various modern development methods, mainly of object-oriented extraction, such as the Unified Process. Although the adoption of use cases proliferated in the context of software systems development, they are not as extensively employed in business modeling . The concept of business use case is not a novelty, but only recently did it begin to re-circulate in the literature and in case tools.
This paper examines the issues involved in adopting business use cases for capturing the functionality of an organization and proposes guidelines for their identification, packaging, and mapping to system use cases. The proposed guidelines are based on the principle of actor perception described in the paper. The application of this principle is exemplified with a worked example aimed at demonstrating the utility of the proposed guidelines and at clarifying the application of the principle of actor perception. The worked example is based on a series of workshops run at a major UK financial institution
Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications
Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for
the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research
experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts
today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited
abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes,
thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led
to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at
formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism
are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of
clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN)
paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right
kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence
in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and
synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a
self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in
formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial
Consistency Checking of Natural Language Temporal Requirements using Answer-Set Programming
Successful software engineering practice requires high quality requirements. Inconsistency is one of the main requirement issues that may prevent software projects from being success. This is particularly onerous when the requirements concern temporal constraints. Manual checking whether temporal requirements are consistent is tedious and error prone when the number of requirements is large. This dissertation addresses the problem of identifying inconsistencies in temporal requirements expressed as natural language text. The goal of this research is to create an efficient, partially automated, approach for checking temporal consistency of natural language requirements and to minimize analysts\u27 workload.
The key contributions of this dissertation are as follows: (1) Development of a partially automated approach for checking temporal consistency of natural language requirements. (2) Creation of a formal language Temporal Action Language (TeAL), which provide a means to represent natural language requirements precisely and unambiguously. (3) Development of a front end to semi-automatically translate natural language requirements into TeAL. (4) Development of a translator from TeAL to the ASP language.
Validation results to date show that the front end tool makes the task of translating natural language requirements into TeAL more accurate and efficient, and the translator generates ASP programs that correctly detect the inconsistencies in the requirements
Geospatial Narratives and their Spatio-Temporal Dynamics: Commonsense Reasoning for High-level Analyses in Geographic Information Systems
The modelling, analysis, and visualisation of dynamic geospatial phenomena
has been identified as a key developmental challenge for next-generation
Geographic Information Systems (GIS). In this context, the envisaged
paradigmatic extensions to contemporary foundational GIS technology raises
fundamental questions concerning the ontological, formal representational, and
(analytical) computational methods that would underlie their spatial
information theoretic underpinnings.
We present the conceptual overview and architecture for the development of
high-level semantic and qualitative analytical capabilities for dynamic
geospatial domains. Building on formal methods in the areas of commonsense
reasoning, qualitative reasoning, spatial and temporal representation and
reasoning, reasoning about actions and change, and computational models of
narrative, we identify concrete theoretical and practical challenges that
accrue in the context of formal reasoning about `space, events, actions, and
change'. With this as a basis, and within the backdrop of an illustrated
scenario involving the spatio-temporal dynamics of urban narratives, we address
specific problems and solutions techniques chiefly involving `qualitative
abstraction', `data integration and spatial consistency', and `practical
geospatial abduction'. From a broad topical viewpoint, we propose that
next-generation dynamic GIS technology demands a transdisciplinary scientific
perspective that brings together Geography, Artificial Intelligence, and
Cognitive Science.
Keywords: artificial intelligence; cognitive systems; human-computer
interaction; geographic information systems; spatio-temporal dynamics;
computational models of narrative; geospatial analysis; geospatial modelling;
ontology; qualitative spatial modelling and reasoning; spatial assistance
systemsComment: ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information (ISSN 2220-9964);
Special Issue on: Geospatial Monitoring and Modelling of Environmental
Change}. IJGI. Editor: Duccio Rocchini. (pre-print of article in press
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