Towards Controlled Natural Language for Event-Driven Temporal Requirements

Currently, requirements for control software written in natural language are often formulated ambiguously and incompletely. Controlled natural languages (CNLs) can solve this problem, at the same time maintaining flexibility for writing and conveying requirements in an intuitive and common way. The creation of domain-specific controlled natural languages nowadays is under active development. In this paper, we suggest CNL which is based on event-driven semantics. This language is intended for describing the temporal properties of cyber-physical systems. We develop our CNL using a number of natural language patterns build for classes of requirements expressed in Event-Driven Temporal Logic formalism (EDTL). Due to formal semantics of EDTL, the suggested CNL is also unambiguous and can be translated into logic formulas. As a result, the proposed CNL provides an auxiliary tool to improve communication quality between different participants in the industrial system development process: customers, requirements engineers, developers, and others. Therefore, the solution helps to reduce the number of errors in the formulation of requirements at earlier stages of development.