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The written specification of requirements is of keen interest because it is used as a primary form of communication between stakeholders in the system development process as well as often serving as the basis of a contractual agreement between the customer and the developer. For this communication to be effective, the requirements document must be both readable, precise and expressed at an appropriate level of abstraction.  

Cooper's Ph.D. thesis research addresses the challenge of achieving the precision and rigour of conventional formal specification notations such as Z and S without sacrificing the readability of less formal approaches to specification of requirements. Cooper's research focuses specifically on the formal specification of requirements for data-oriented systems with the research objective of defining a core notation that can be used to write highly-readable (without extensive training in formal methods), machine-checkable references to a logical model of data expressed at the same level of abstraction used by domain experts in less formal approaches. This core notation could then be incorporated into an established style of requirements specification so that imprecise or potentially ambiguous phrases of English text could be selectively replaced by phrase expressed in this core notation.  

The expected outcome of Cooper's research will provide the requirements author with a means of developing requirements documentation on a large project in a form which allows many aspects of the internal consistency of this documentation to be validate using software tools that parsed the formalized portions of the documentation into an internal mathematical representation. The formalized portions of this document may also be suitable for use as input to other processes such as the automated test case generation process under development in the FormalWare project by Michael Donat (UBC Computer Science).  

Cooper is interacting with engineers at Hughes who are using some early results of her work to specify requirements for aspects of an advanced air traffic management system under investigation at Hughes as a separate R&D project.  
  

Further Information:

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