Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

This paper describes an approach to writing requirements specifications for process-control systems, a specification language that supports this approach, and an example application of the approach and the language on an industrial aircraft collision avoidance system (TCAS II). The example specfication demonstrates (1) the practicality of writing a formal requirements specification for a complex, process-control system and (2) the feasibility of building a formal model of a system usinf a specification language that is readable and reviewable by applications experts who are not computer scientists or mathematicians. Some lessons learned in the process of this work, which are applicable both to forward and reverse engineering, are also presented.