Automated Runtime Temporal Constraint Checking for Engineering Process Compliance

What the paper says

In safety-critical engineering domains, engineering processes guide developers toward producing systems that adhere to stringent standards of safety and quality, while also allowing for the inherent flexibility of creative tasks. Process compliance focuses on ensuring that the engineering work-as manifested in the creation, tracking, and tracing of engineering artifacts-follows the described processes as closely as possible. The sequence of process steps is typically described using temporal process constraints over engineering artifact metadata (e.g., a requirement must transition from ‘draft’ to ‘ready for review’). Existing approaches, however, lack support for checking temporal constraints during development and rely on manual checks, resulting in delayed feedback when deviations occur. In this paper, we present an automated, incremental constraint checking approach that can evaluate temporal constraints across inter-related artifacts upon every artifact change, enabling timely feedback on process deviations. Our approach includes an incremental checking mechanism for temporal process constraints, and the ability to dynamically evaluate and integrate the history of artifacts as they become relevant for the constraints. Temporal constraints are expressed in the Object Constraint Language (OCL) extended with operators from Linear Temporal Logic (LTL). We demonstrate the ability of our approach to support a wide range of higher-level temporal patterns. We show that for constraints in an industry-derived use case, we can detect a significant number of temporal process constraint violations, some remaining unfulfilled after the end of the development process. We also find that, in this use case, the average evaluation for a single constraint operator takes around 0.3 milliseconds.