Modelling behavioural requirements and alignment with verification in the embedded industry

Paper in proceeding, 2017

Formalising requirements has the potential to solve problems arising from deficiencies in natural language descriptions. While behavioural requirements are rarely described formally in industry, increasing complexity and new safety standards have renewed the interest in formal specifications. The goal of this paper is to explore how behavioural requirements for embedded systems can be formalised and aligned with verification tasks. Over the course of a 2.5-year project with industry, we modelled existing requirements from a safety-critical automotive software function in several iterations. Taking practical limitations and stakeholder preferences into account, we explored the use of models on different abstraction levels. The final model was used to generate test cases and was evaluated in three interviews with relevant industry practitioners. We conclude that models on a high level of abstraction are most suitable for industrial requirements engineering, especially when they need to be interpreted by other stakeholders.