Consistency Checking of Functional Requirements

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes the importance of automating the consistency checking of functional requirements to improve accuracy and efficiency in designing complex, safety-critical cyber-physical systems.

Contribution

It highlights the need for automated methods to verify the consistency of informal and semi-formal requirements in complex systems.

Findings

Manual checks are error-prone and not scalable.

Automated consistency checking can improve reliability.

Supports safety-critical system development.

Abstract

Requirements are informal and semi-formal descriptions of the expected behavior of a system. They are usually expressed in the form of natural language sentences and checked for errors manually, e.g., by peer reviews. Manual checks are error-prone, time-consuming and not scalable. With the increasing complexity of cyber-physical systems and the need of operating in safety- and security-critical environments, it became essential to automatize the consistency check of requirements and build artifacts to help system engineers in the design process.