Formal Methods in Requirements Engineering: Survey and Future Directions

Requirements engineering plays a pivotal role in the development of safety-critical systems. However, the process is usually a manual one and can lead to errors and inconsistencies in the requirements that are not easily detectable. Formal methods are mathematically rigorous techniques that can aid engineers to detect errors and produce consistent and correct requirements. We survey a variety of requirements capture and analysis tools presented in the literature. Specifically, we focus on tools that incorporate formal methods techniques into their analyses. We discuss the various tools’ strengths and weaknesses, identify current trends in requirements engineering research, and highlight open research questions.CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Requirements analysis; Specification languages.