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Toward Improved Traceability of Safety Requirements and State-Based Design Models

Alenazi, Mounifah
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8792-0640
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1623168093414723

Abstract Details

2021, PhD, University of Cincinnati, Engineering and Applied Science: Computer Science and Engineering.
<p align="justify">Traceability has long been recognized as an important component in building safety critical systems. Traceability therefore is often required by many government regulations. For example, the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) standard DO-178B specifies that software developers must be able to demonstrate traceability of designs against requirements. In systems engineering projects, the development of complex and dependable systems like autonomous vehicles relies increasingly on the use of the Systems Modeling Language (SysML). In fact, SysML has become a de facto standard for systems engineering. Effective traceability in such systems can be very costly and difficult. Researchers have therefore proposed many techniques to automatically establish and evolve trace links for high assurance projects. Various research approaches use information retrieval-based tracing methods to automatically recover trace links between modeling artifacts. For example, to verify a safety requirement, a query is used to retrieve the related elements in the design models. Our ability to trace is therefore anchored to the ability to retrieve. While trace retrieval has been the predominant way of automatically creating links, the performance is yet to be satisfactory for broad industrial adaption, and many false positives remain a significant challenge. In this thesis, we present a novel approach that overcomes this challenge. In particular, the work in this thesis has three main objectives. The first is to identify and address the research challenges of identifying trace links in the context of SysML models. For this objective, we empirically investigate if traditional traceability approaches using textual information could yield promising results in our context. We also conduct a comprehensive investigation of traceability features within state-of-the-practice SysML modeling tools to understand how the traceability information is supported and managed in these tools. The second objective is to leverage mutation analysis and process mining to verify safety requirements. For this objective, we first carry out a systematic mapping study to identify the common modeling mistakes in SysML. Our goal is to understand the scope of these mistakes (the incorrect links), their types, the implications of those mistakes in model-driven requirements engineering, and then use these mistakes as a basis to identify mutation operators. Once the mutants are created, they undergo model checking so as to automatically verify the safety requirements. Building this foundation is a necessary step that facilitates the third objective which is to tackle false positives that have plagued automated requirements traceability. Rather than striving for defining an accurate tracing mechanism which often ends up with many imperfect links, our core idea is to exploit the mutants (imperfect tracing targets) and then take full advantage of them to discover the traceability links. Checking the requirements over the mutants leads to the distinction between killed and survived mutants. We leverage the underlying killed-survived distinction and develop a correlation analysis procedure to identify the traceability links. The results show considerable precision improvements compared with the state-of-the-art.

Nan Niu, Ph.D. (Committee Chair)
Raj Bhatnagar, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Chia Han, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Gunter Mussbacher, PhD (Committee Member)
Carla Purdy, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
136 p.
Computer Science
requirements traceability; Systems Modeling Language; mutation analysis; process mining

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Alenazi, M. (2021). Toward Improved Traceability of Safety Requirements and State-Based Design Models [Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1623168093414723

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Alenazi, Mounifah. Toward Improved Traceability of Safety Requirements and State-Based Design Models. 2021. University of Cincinnati, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1623168093414723.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Alenazi, Mounifah. "Toward Improved Traceability of Safety Requirements and State-Based Design Models." Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 2021. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1623168093414723

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ucin1623168093414723
254
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This open access ETD is published by University of Cincinnati and OhioLINK.