An environment-driven ontological approach to requirements elicitation for safety-critical systems

Abstract

The environment, where a safety critical system (SCS) operates, is an important source from which safety requirements of the SCS can originate. By treating the system under construction as a black box, the environment is typically documented as a number of assumptions, based on which a set of environmental safety requirements will be elicited. However, it is not a trivial task in practice to capture the environmental assumptions to elicit safety requirements. The lack of certain assumptions or too strict assumptions will either result in incomplete environmental safety requirements or waste many efforts on eliciting incorrect requirements. Moreover, the variety of operating environment for an SCS will further complicate the task, since the captured assumptions are at risk of invalidity, and consequently the elicited requirements need to be revisited to ensure safety has not been compromised by the change. This short paper presents an on-going work aiming to 1) systematically organize the knowledge of system operating environment and, 2) facilitate the elicitation of environmental safety requirements. We propose an ontological approach to achieve the objectives. In particular, we utilize conceptual ontologies to organize the environment knowledge in terms of relevant environment concepts, relations among them and axioms. Environmental assumptions are captured by instantiating the environment ontology. An ontological reasoning mechanism is also provided to support elicitation of safety requirements from the captured assumptions.