Tools for the modelling and analysis of requirements for telecommunication systems (CAT)

Duration

1995-2001

Keywords

requirements, distributed systems, agents, specification, formal methods

Description

Requirements Analysis is considered as a crucial activity of the software

lifecycle and has a strong impact on its maintenability.

The requirement document forms a contractual basis between customers

expressing their needs about the software to be developed, and

the software engineer in charge of implementing it.

Several formalisms (e.g. MERISE, SADT and OMT) are currently available.

They are used to describe the functional part of the requirements document.

But these approaches have two weaknesses. On one hand, they do not

allow to model all the apects of the requirements document (viz.

deadlines, security and reliability aspects, etc.).

On the other hand, it is not possible to develop

powerful tools to support those modelling languages (i.e. tools

which checks the soundness of the requirements document and

which help the adequacy of the requirements document with the

real requirements expressed by the customers).

The goal of the CAT applied research project is the development

of CASE tools to support the modelling and the analysis of requirements

for distributed and real-time systems.

These tools will rely on the ALBERT language developed

at the University of Namur and which has been used to model requirements for telecommunication applications, computer integrated manufacturing and

distributed process control.

Through its goal, CAT project aims to:

• reinforce the know-how in requirements analysis currently available in

  some companies;

• sensitize and offer guidance to companies experiencing problems

  with the writing of requirements documents.

Research unit(s)

• PReCISE Research Center (PRECISE)
• Semantics and Computational Logic (ISLC)

Research theme(s)

• Requirements Engineering and Business-IT Alignment
• Computer languages semantics

Staff (finished contracts)

Publications (3)

Conference Proceedings

Research reports

Contracts

• Ministère de la Région Wallonne

More information