Rigorous engineering of product-line requirements: A case study in failure management

Abstract

We consider the failure detection and management function for engine control systems as an application domain where product line engineering is indicated. The need to develop a generic requirement set – for subsequent system instantiation – is complicated by the addition of the high levels of verification demanded by this safety-critical domain, subject to avionics industry standards. We present our case study experience in this area as a candidate method for the engineering, validation and verification of generic requirements using domain engineering and Formal Methods techniques and tools. For a defined class of systems, the case study produces a generic requirement set in UML and an example system instance. Domain analysis and engineering produce a validated model which is integrated with the formal specification/verification method B by the use of our UML-B profile. The formal verification both of the generic requirement set, and of a simple system instance, is demonstrated using our U2B, ProB and prototype Requirements Manager tools. This work is a demonstrator for a tool-supported method which will be an output of EU project RODIN (This work is conducted in the setting of the EU funded Research Project: IST 511599 RODIN (Rigorous Open Development Environment for Complex Systems) http://rodin.cs.ncl.ac.uk/ ). The use of existing and prototype formal verification and support tools is discussed. The method, developed in application to this novel combination of product line, failure management and safety-critical engineering, is evaluated and considered to be applicable to a wide range of domains.