Enhancing Coherency of Specification Documents from Automotive Industry

Abstract

A specification describes how a system should behave. If a specification is incorrect or wrongly implemented, then the resulting system will contain errors that can lead to catastrophic states especially in sensitive systems like the one embedded in cars.

This paper presents a method to construct a formal model from a specification written in natural language. This implies that the specification is sufficiently accurate to be incorporated in a model so as to find the inconsistencies in this specification. Sufficiently means that the error rate is down 2%. The error counting method is discussed in the paper. A definition of specification consistency is thus given in this paper.

The method used to construct the model is automatic and points out to the user the inconsistencies of the specification. Moreover once the model is constructed, the general test plan reflecting the specification is produced. This test plan will ensure that the system that implements the specification meets the requirements.