Automated SMT-based consistency checking of industrial critical requirements

Abstract

With the ever-increasing size, complexity and intricacy of system requirements specifications, it becomes difficult to ensure their correctness with respect to certain criteria such as consistency. Automated formal techniques for consistency checking of requirements, mostly by means of model checking, have been proposed in academia. Sometimes such techniques incur a high modeling cost or analysis time, or are not applicable. To address such problems, in this paper we propose an automated consistency analysis technique of requirements that are formalized based on patterns, and checked using state-of-the-art Satisfiability Modulo Theories solvers. Our method assumes several transformation steps, from textual requirements to formal logic, and next into the format suited for the SMT tool. To automate such steps, we propose a tool, called PROPAS, that does not require any user intervention during the transformation and analysis phases, thus making the consistency analysis usable by non-expert practitioners. For validation, we apply our method on a set of timed computation tree logic requirements of an industrial automotive system called the Fuel Level Display.