Completeness in Software Requirements Specifications for Process Control Systems

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The goal of this work is to provide a rigorous basis for ascertaining whether or not a given set of software requirements is internally complete. This will require determining the types of individual requirements that are necessary to provide complete functional and performance specifications along with a formal notation that will allow the development of rules of inference and closure criteria for derived requirements. This problem is important both for economic and safety reasons. The high cost and difficulty of correction requirements specification errors in the later stages of the software development process implies that great leverage can be obtained by methods that help to find problems early. Also, a large number of software-related accidents can be traced to requirements problems, and incompleteness in terms of requirements is often a casual factor. Furthermore, formal analysis of safe software behavior cannot be guaranteed by testing alone; analysis of the specified behavior of the system is necessary and this is not possible if the behavioral specification is incomplete. Emphasis will be placed on aspects of software requirements specification that have not previously been adequately handled including timing abstractions, the man/machine interface, and robustness.