Abstract
EARS is a technique used by Rolls-Royce and many other organizations around the world to capture requirements in natural language in a precise manner. In this paper we describe the EARS-CTRL tool for writing and analyzing EARS requirements for controllers. We provide two levels of analysis of requirements written in EARS-CTRL: firstly our editor uses projectional editing as well as typing (based on a glossary of controller terms) to ensure as far as possible well-formedness by construction of the requirements; secondly we have used a controller synthesis tool to check whether a set of EARS-CTRL requirements is realizable as an actual controller. In the positive case, the tool synthesizes and displays the controller as a synchronous dataflow diagram. This information can be used to examine the specified behavior and to iteratively correct, improve or complete a set of EARS-CTRL requirements.
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Notes
- 1.
For analysability reasons, EARS-CTRL’s syntax is slighty different from EARS’. In particular EARS disavows the usage of “until” clauses and composed logical expressions in a requirement.
- 2.
The requirement in Fig. 5 is an instance of template While A, when B the system shall C until D. The corresponding LTL is of the form \(C \rightarrow (B\,\mathbf W \,(D\vee \lnot A))\), W being the weak-until operator.
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Acknowledgements
This work was developed for the “IETS3” research project, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research under code 01IS15037A/B.
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Lúcio, L., Rahman, S., Cheng, CH., Mavin, A. (2017). Just Formal Enough? Automated Analysis of EARS Requirements. In: Barrett, C., Davies, M., Kahsai, T. (eds) NASA Formal Methods. NFM 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10227. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57288-8_31
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