Goal-oriented requirements analysis for process control systems design

During the last two decades, a lot of effort has been focused on automating the generation of software applications. The automation process can start early, after some manual stage(s) or following (a) previous automatic stage(s). Such automation tools should have the capability of generating executable programs, specifications, or formal requirements, as appropriate. The requirements gathering and checking is considered as the most important phase to eliminate bugs that appear later and may be removed during the design or implementation phases, but with higher cost and effort. The GOPCSD (goal-oriented process control systems design) tool is designed to gather and structure the requirements for process control systems. The tool achieves separation between the process system engineer´s view and the software engineer´s. The tool hides the mathematic details of B method from the system engineer; enabling him to focus only on the operation specifications while the software engineer within the B toolkit environment focuses on programming paradigms. Some adaptations have been applied to the method of KAOS in order to yield maximum benefit while minimizing both the required time and the effort to complete the gathering of application requirements for process control systems. After studying different process control case studies, six patterns have been identified: two (alternative and conjunction pattern) of them extending the existing patterns in the KAOS method and four (sequence, disjunction, simultaneous, and inheritance patterns) are new and can be extensively found within the process control systems.