Deriving and Verifying B Specifications from Problem Frames Models via Model Transformation

The Problem Frames (PF) approach has gained wide attention in the requirements engineering community, however, it lacks a precise semantic description of the derived specifications in a language that has been adopted in an industrial setting. This often leads to difficulties, gaps and challenges in the design and verification process of software systems. The aim of this work is to investigate how the PF models can be transformed into specifications expressed in the B formal language, which is well-known for being adopted in industry, i.e., specifying the control software for the Metro subway in Paris. In this paper, we provide rigorous syntactic and semantic rules for formal modeling and verifying the model transformation from PF models into B specifications. We define a set of conversion rules at the meta-model level and the conversion is automated at the model level, for which ATL (Atlas Transformation Language) is used to construct the transformation rules. Then the derived specifications in the B language are verified using the Atelier B model checker. Through an example study, we demonstrate that our automated transformation approach can successfully convert PF models into specifications in the B language, which provides stronger support for the design and verification of software systems. Finally, we envision and argue that the work along this line of research will potentially move PF research closer to practical applications, which is much needed for the PF approach.