Formal Verification of Ecosystem Restoration Requirements using UML and Alloy

TL;DR

This paper presents a formal verification approach for ecosystem restoration requirements using UML and Alloy, ensuring reliable specifications and meeting restoration goals through model checking.

Contribution

It introduces a novel formal modeling and verification method for ecosystem restoration requirements using UML metamodels and Alloy analysis.

Findings

Formal models can verify ecosystem restoration requirements.

Alloy Analyzer ensures safety and liveness properties.

Approach validated with a real-world Costa Rican ecosystem example.

Abstract

United Nations have declared the current decade (2021-2030) as the "UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration" to join R\&D forces to fight against the ongoing environmental crisis. Given the ongoing degradation of earth ecosystems and the related crucial services that they offer to the human society, ecosystem restoration has become a major society-critical issue. It is required to develop rigorously software applications managing ecosystem restoration. Reliable models of ecosystems and restoration goals are necessary. This paper proposes a rigorous approach for ecosystem requirements modeling using formal methods from a model-driven software engineering point of view. The authors describe the main concepts at stake with a metamodel in UML and introduce a formalization of this metamodel in Alloy. The formal model is executed with Alloy Analyzer, and safety and liveness properties are checked against it. This approach helps ensuring that ecosystem specifications are reliable and that the specified ecosystem meets the desired restoration goals, seen in our approach as liveness and safety properties. The concepts and activities of the approach are illustrated with CRESTO, a real-world running example of a restored Costa Rican ecosystem.