Embedding UML and type theory to formalize the process of requirement engineering

Abstract

Nowadays, the main reason for the failure of large-scale systems developments is that the requirements analysis stage cannot produce complete, understandable, unambiguous traceable and testable system requirements documents. To conquer this problem, from the point of view of "requirements engineering" (RE), the formalization of the RE process is discussed from three aspects: a full process model, formal representation and formal verification. RE is taken as a process growing in the 3D space of sociology, methodology and technology, and a spiral lifecycle model of this process is given to illustrate its social characteristics. The recommended representation language is UML, and Coq is used as a component-cut-in modular formal method to carry out validation and verification. Finally, the alternating-bit protocol is presented as an example to demonstrate how to combine UML and Coq to formalize RE.