Enabling Efficient Real-Time Requirements Inconsistency Detection for Safety-Critical Systems

The importance of real-time requirements inconsistency detection is increasingly manifested in safety -critical system development. Most existing tools use state-based detection methods for real-time requirements verification, but they sometimes struggle to efficiently detect results when faced with complex system requirements. Moreover, adding device properties into the verification has increased the complexity of the state space. As a complementary, in this paper, we present a lightweight efficient method for real-time requirements existence inconsistency detection for safety-critical systems. We reduce the real-time existential inconsistencies detection problem into a constraint solving problem. The real-time requirements and involved device properties are encoded into SMT formulas, which can be detected quickly by using a constraint solver such as Z3. Through a case study and experimental evaluation, it is shown that our method can efficiently detect real-time existential inconsistencies in requirements. This provides a practical solution to detect certain types of errors in the early stage, avoiding possible future expensive costs.