Requirements development and management of embedded real-time systems

Abstract

It is well recognized that most of the anomalies, discovered in the development of embedded real-time systems, belong to requirement and specification phases. To ease the situation, many efforts have been investigated into the area. For requirements development, especially requirements validation and verification, model-driven architecture techniques can be considered as a cost-efficient solution. In order to utilize such advantages, the design of the proposed system is often specified in terms of analyzable models at the certain level of abstraction. Further, different levels of requirements are translated into verifiable queries and fed into the models to be either validated or verified. For requirements management, requirements traceability provides critical support for performing change impact analysis, risk analysis, regression testing, etc. In this thesis, we cover several topics about requirements validation, requirements verification, and requirements traceability. In particular, the technical contributions are three-fold: 1) we propose an approach to requirements validation by using the extended Timed Abstract State Machine (TASM) language with newly defined TASM constructs and, 2) we present a simulation-based method which is powered up by statistical techniques to conduct requirements verification, working with industrial applications and, 3) we introduce an improved VSM-based requirements traceability recovery approach using a novel context analysis. Further, we have demonstrated the applicability of our contributions in real world usage through various case studies.