Requirements Specifications for Hybrid Systems

Abstract

The purpose of a computer system requirements specification is to describe the computer system's required external behavior. To avoid over specification, the requirements specification should describe the system behavior as a mathematical relation between entities in the system's environment. When some of these entities are continuous and others are discrete, the system is referred to as a "hybrid" system. Although computer science provides many techniques for representing and reasoning about the discrete quantities that affect system behavior, practical approaches for specifying and analyzing systems containing both discrete and continuous quantities are lacking. The purpose of this paper is to present a formal framework for representing and reasoning about the requirements of hybrid systems. As background, the paper briefly reviews an abstract model for specifying system and software requirements, called the Four Variable Model [12], and a related requirements method, called SCR (Software Cost Reduction) [10, 1]. The paper then introduces a special discrete version of the Four Variable Model, the SCR requirements model [8] and proposes an extension of the SCR model for specifying and reasoning about hybrid systems.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 1996
Accession Number
ADA463944

Entities

People

  • Constance Heitmeyer

Organizations

  • United States Naval Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • C4I
  • Sensors

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Accuracy
  • Complex Systems
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Control Systems
  • Cost Reductions
  • Engineering
  • Environment
  • Hybrid Systems
  • Military Research
  • Numbers
  • Reasoning
  • Specifications
  • Standards
  • Time Intervals
  • Transitions

Fields of Study

  • Computer science
  • Engineering

Readers

  • Database Systems and Applications
  • Software Engineering
  • Systems Analysis and Design