Automated Repair of Requirements for Cyber-Physical Systems in Simulink Requirements Tables
For developers of cyber-physical systems, this work addresses the practical challenge of faulty or outdated requirements by automating their repair, complementing traditional program repair.
The paper tackles the problem of misaligned requirements in cyber-physical systems and proposes a framework that repairs requirements using system execution data. On six real-world case studies with 12 requirements, the framework produced correct and useful repaired requirements.
The development of complex software systems, e.g., cyber-physical systems (CPSs), involves continuous evolution of both system implementations and their requirements. These two artifacts often proceed independently, creating a risk of misalignment. For example, a system may be updated due to implementation-level concerns, yielding a new version that no longer satisfies its original requirements. Traditional compliance recovery techniques, e.g., automated program repair, address this problem by modifying the system while assuming that requirements are correct. However, faulty, outdated or inadequate requirements are a well-documented challenge in practice, motivating the complementary task of requirement repair. In this paper, we propose a framework that leverages system execution data to repair misaligned CPS requirements, thereby restoring requirement-to-system compliance. Our approach evaluates the correctness of declarative requirements over time-based, real-valued signals expressed using the MATLAB Simulink Requirements Tables language. We evaluate seven variants of our framework on six real-world case studies covering 12 requirements. Results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed framework in producing correct and useful repaired requirements.