An Automatic Method For Specification Of Embedded Software Requirements Based On Device Knowledge

Embedded systems are closely related to human life and are widely used in various fields such as automotive electronics,aerospace,rail transportation,medical devices and personal mobile devices.As the functions of embedded devices become richer and more powerful,the software requirements of embedded systems become numerous and complex.The complexity of embedded system requirements makes the requirement analysis of embedded system necessary and requires a systematic requirement specification approach.The embedded system contains software and devices,and its high-level system requirements involve business logic,which makes domain experts in the requirement analysis in a very important position,and requires the collaboration of requirement experts and domain experts to complete the work.In addition,since the software interacts directly with the device,the software requirements obtained by the specification are sensitive to the device.In order to reduce the dependence on requirement experts and improve the efficiency and quality of requirement specification,this thesis proposes an automatic approach for the specification of software requirements for embedded systems based on a device knowledge base.It allows domain experts to model the devices of embedded systems in advance and construct a device knowledge base.It takes the embedded system requirements specified by the domain expert as input,establishes a software requirement derivation approach based on the device knowledge base,and automatically verifies the software requirements to generate a high-quality embedded software requirement specification.The main contributions of this thesis include:A method for building domain-specific device knowledge bases of embedded systems is proposed.The meta-model of the device knowledge base is defined by summarizing the characteristics of the devices of embedded systems.The domainspecific device knowledge base is obtained by instantiating the meta-model.An automatic derivation approach from system requirements to software requirements for embedded systems based on a device knowledge base is proposed.The approach uses the devices in the device knowledge base as a carrier and establishes the synchronization,desired enablement and behavior enablement relationships between system requirements and software requirements through scenario diagrams.A derivation method incorporating a model checker is proposed to ef- ficiently derive software requirements using model checking.An approach for efficient verification of the consistency of functional and temporal constraints of software requirements for embedded systems based on SMT is defined,and a software requirements specification is generated.The approach converts events and their relations in the software requirement representation into logical clocks and their constraint relations,and further represents them as SMT formulas,specifically,converts requirement consistency into SMT formulas to be satisfied as well,finds inconsistencies by constraint solving,and generates software requirement specification from the verified software requirements.The proposed approach is applied to the case of a satellite control system to demonstrate its feasibility.The results show that the proposed approach can perform the automatic specification of the software requirements of the embedded system and obtain a consistent software requirements specification.The evaluation results also show that the proposed approach can assist domain experts to derive the software requirement specification with high efficiency and good quality.