Formal approaches to requirements engineering: from behavior trees to alloy

• Published in: Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering, 2005 pp. 916 - 919
• Main Authors: Itani, W., Logrippo, L.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2005
• Subjects: Computer science; Constraint theory; Formal specifications; Information technology; Logic; Power engineering and energy; Power system modeling; Software engineering; Software systems; Tree graphs
• ISBN: 0780388852; 9780780388857
• ISSN: 0840-7789; 2576-7046
• DOI: 10.1109/CCECE.2005.1557126

Requirements modeling is receiving a good deal of attention from the software engineering community. However, the lack of formal representation and tool support is hindering the power of many promising requirements modeling approaches. Behavior trees are no exception. This graphical approach to requirements engineering advocates building a software system from its set of requirements, rather than building a system that satisfies its requirements. In this paper, we present an approach to formalize and analyze behavior tree models using the alloy constraint language, which is based on first order logic and set theory. The defined semantics interpretations of behavior trees provide a precise and rigorous formal basis for checking the consistency, completeness, and soundness of system requirements