Jeudi 13 mars 2025 de 14h00 à 15h30
Salle plénière – Centre Inria de l’Université de Lille – Villeneuve d’Ascq
Abstract: In this talk, we will discuss some challenges encountered by software manufacturers who build safety-critical and certifiable software. We will focus on the challenge of specifying and verifying requirements. For safety-critical software, a large number of requirements must be specified, verified and managed; and many of these requirements result from large sets of guidelines embodied in some standards. For instance, a real-time operating system for avionics must comply with both DO178C and ARINC653. Also, most safety-critical software manufacturers are using natural language to specify requirements, which is prone to ambiguity and inconsistency, and does not enable automatic analysis. Thus, requirements specification and verification of safety-critical software are resource-consuming and error-prone. In our research, we leverage model-driven engineering (MDE) and Controlled-Natural language (CNL) techniques to tackle these challenges. We proposed and implemented an approach that combines MDE and CNL to model requirements templates that support and constrain the specification of requirements. Our approach relies on: 1) a unified language (UTL) that enables the creation, implementation and evolution of requirements templates; 2) mappings between the requirements templates and domain models to support, to some extent, requirements verification and auto-filling; 3) a systematic process for the creation of templates and 4) a tool chain that enables the creation of templates using UTL and their use for requirements specification. Empirical evaluations of our approach were carried out through several case studies and user studies involving an industrial partner.
Bio: Ghizlane El Boussaidi received the PhD degree in software engineering from the Université de Montréal, Canada, in 2010. She is a full professor at the Software and IT engineering department of École de Technologie Supérieure (ETS) in Montréal, Canada. Her research interests include model-driven development, software re-engineering and modernization, requirements engineering, and the design and certification of safety critical systems. She participated in and led several research projects funded by Canadian agencies and industry partners specifically Avionics. She also has over 15 years of industrial experience during which she contributed to the development and the implementation of various software systems. She has published her work in international conferences and journals, including IEEE TSE, SoSyM, JSS, ACM computing surveys, ACM/IEEE MODELS, ACM/IEEE ICSE, ICSOC, IEEE/ACM MSR, IEEE ISSRE and IEEE/ACM ICPC.
