Chase: Contract-Based Requirement Engineering For Cyber-Physical System Design

This paper presents CHASE, a framework for requirement capture, formalization, and validation for cyberphysical systems. CHASE combines a practical front-end formal specification language based on patterns with a rigorous verification back-end based on assume-guarantee contracts. The front-end language can express temporal properties of networks using a declarative style, and supports automatic translation from natural-language constructs to low-level mathematical languages. The verification back-end leverages the mathematical formalism of contracts to reason about system requirements and determine inconsistencies and dependencies between them. CHASE features a modular and extensible software infrastructure that can support different domain-specific languages, modeling formalisms, and analysis tools. We illustrate its effectiveness on industrial design examples, including control of aircraft power distribution networks and arbitration of a mixed-criticality automotive bus.