Consistency of Property Specification Patterns with Boolean and Constrained Numerical Signals

TL;DR

This paper extends Property Specification Patterns to include Boolean and numerical constraints, enabling more expressive requirement formalization and automated verification, demonstrated through encoding, scalability tests, and a robotic controller case study.

Contribution

It introduces an extension of PSPs with constraints, an encoding to LTL, and demonstrates practical scalability and applicability to robotic systems.

Findings

Encoding of constrained PSPs to LTL is effective.

The approach scales to realistic requirement sizes.

It enables proving consistency of requirements in robotic controllers.

Abstract

Property Specification Patterns (PSPs) have been proposed to solve recurring specification needs, to ease the formalization of requirements, and enable automated verification thereof. In this paper, we extend PSPs by considering Boolean as well as atomic assertions from a constraint system. This extension enables us to reason about functional requirements which could not be captured by basic PSPs. We contribute an encoding from constrained PSPs to LTL formulas, and we show experimental results demonstrating that our approach scales on requirements of realistic size generated using an artificial probabilistic model. Finally, we show that our extension enables us to prove (in)consistency of requirements about an embedded controller for a robotic manipulator.