Specifying Safety-Critical Heterogeneous Systems Using Contracts Theory

Abstract: Requirements engineering (RE) is a well-established practice that is also emphasized in safety standards such as IEC 61508 and ISO 26262. Safety standards advocate a particularly stringent RE where requirements must be structured in an hierarchical manner in accordance with the system architecture; at each level, requirements must be allocated to heterogeneous (SW, HW, mechanical, electrical, etc.) architecture elements and trace links must be established between requirements. In contrast to the stringent RE in safety standards, according to previous studies, RE in industry is in general of poor quality. Considering a typical RE tool, other than basic impact analysis, the tool neither gives feedback nor guides a user  when specifying, allocating, and structuring requirements. In practice, for industry to comply with the stringent RE in safety standards, better support for RE is needed, not only from tools, but also from principles and methods.Therefore, a foundation is presented consisting of an underlying theory for specifying heterogeneous systems and complementary principles and methods to specifically support the stringent RE in safety standards. This foundation is indeed suitable as a base for implementing guidance- and feedback-driven tool support for such stringent RE; however, the fact is that the proposed theory, principles, and methods provide essential support  regardless if tools are used or not.The underlying theory is a formal compositional contracts theory for heterogeneous systems. This contracts theory embodies the essential RE property of separating requirements on a system from assumptions on its environment. Moreover, the contracts theory formalizes the stringent RE effort of structuring requirements hierarchically with respect to the system architecture. Thus, the proposed principles and methods for supporting the stringent RE in safety standards are well-rooted in formal concepts and conditions, and are thus, theoretically sound. Not only that, but the foundation is indeed also tailored to be enforced by both existing and new tools considering that the support is based on precise mathematical expressions that can be interpreted unambiguously by machines. Enforcing the foundation in a tool entails support that guides and gives feedback when specifying heterogeneous systems in general, and safety-critical ones in particular.