ReSA Tool: Structured requirements specification and SAT-based consistency-checking

Most industrial embedded systems requirements are specified in natural language, hence they can sometimes be ambiguous and error-prone. Moreover, employing an early-stage model-based incremental system development using multiple levels of abstraction, for instance via architectural languages such as EAST-ADL, calls for different granularity requirements specifications described with abstraction-specific concepts that reflect the respective abstraction level effectively. In this paper, we propose a toolchain for structured requirements specification in the ReSA language, which scales to multiple EAST-ADL levels of abstraction. Furthermore, we introduce a consistency function that is seamlessly integrated into the specification toolchain, for the automatic analysis of requirements logical consistency prior to their temporal logic formalization for full formal verification. The consistency check subsumes two parts: (i) transforming ReSA requirements specification into boolean expressions, and (ii) checking the consistency of the resulting boolean expressions by solving the satisfiability of their conjunction with the Z3 SMT solver. For validation, we apply the ReSA toolchain on an industrial vehicle speed control system, namely the Adjustable Speed Limiter.