Requirements Elicitation in Safety-Critical Systems

• Sthéfanie Dal Magro Federal University of Pernambuco
• Jaelson Castro Federal University of Pernambuco

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/cbsoft_estendido.2020.14612

Abstract

Context: Critical Safety Systems (SCSs) are considered systems that, if they fail, can lead to loss of life, financial losses, and damage to the environment. Requirements Engineering is essential in the development of these systems, considering that the use of inadequate or misunderstood requirements is recognized as the main cause of accidents and catastrophes related to safety. Therefore, the initial safety requirements of SCSs must be carefully identified and properly modeled. However, the literature presents few elicitation techniques and requirements modeling focused on the domain of SCSs. Objective: This research proposes the development of a technique for eliciting requirements in the context of Safety-Critical Systems that will later be modeled using the iStar4Safety notation. Method: Initially, a bibliographic survey will be carried out in order to investigate the requirements elicitation techniques existing in the domain of SCSs. From this bibliographic survey, a new technique will be proposed to discover requirements for Safety-Critical Systems. To validate the proposed technique, a quasi-experiment will be performed. Expected results: With this work, we will define a requirement elicitation technique for SCSs that will allow the modeling of safety requirements through an iStar safety extension. Conclusion: The results found will assist in the process of discovering and modeling requirements in the context of safety-critical systems. We intend to make a positive contribution to the development of these systems, aiming to mitigate hazards and prevent accidents.

Keywords: Requirements engineering, Safety-Critical systems, Requirements elicitation

References

Broomfield, E. J.; Chung, P. W. H. (1997). “Safety assessment and the software requirements specification”. In Reliability Engineering & System Safety, v. 55, n. 3, p. 295-309, 1997.

Du, J., Wang, J., Feng, X. (2014). A safety requirement elicitation technique of safety-critical system based on scenario. In Intelligent Computing Theory, p.127–136.

Knight, J. C. (2002). Safety critical systems. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Software Engineering - ICSE ’02.

Kotonya, G and Sommervile, I. (1998). Requirements Engineering: Processes and Techniques, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York.

Leveson, N. (2011). Engineering a Safer World: Systems Thinking Applied to Safety. Mit Press.

Martins, L.E.G, De Oliveira, T. (2014). A case study using a protocol to derive safety functional requirements from fault tree analysis. In: 2014 IEEE 22nd International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE). IEEE, p. 412-419.

Provenzano, L. et al. (2017) An Ontological Approach to Elicit Safety Requirements. In: 24th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC). IEEE, p. 713-718.

Raspoting, C., Karpati, P., Katta, V. (2012). A combined process for elicitation and analysis of safety and security requirements. In: Enterprise, business-process and information systems modeling. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, p. 347-361.

Ribeiro, S. M. S. (2019) Desenvolvimento de uma extensão da linguagem de modelagem iStar para sistemas críticos de segurança – iStar4Safety. Dissertação (Mestrado em Ciência da Computação) – Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife.

Sommervile, l. (2011). Engenharia de Software, Pearson Prentice Hall, São Paulo.

Vilela, J. Castro, J. Martins, L. E. G. and Gorschek, T, (2017). Integration between requirements engineering and safety analysis: A systematic literature review. In Journal of Systems and Software, Vol. 125, p. 68-92.

Vilela, J., Castro, J., Martins, L. E. G., & Gorschek, T. (2018). Safe-RE. In Proceedings of the XXXII Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering, p. 196-201.

Vilela, J. et al. (2020) Safety Practices in Requirements Engineering: The Uni-REPM Safety Module. In IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 46, no. 3, p. 222-250.

Yu, E. (1995) Modelling Strategic Relationships for Process Reengineering, Ph.D. thesis, also Tech. Report DKBS-TR94-6, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Toronto.