Automated Repair of Requirements for Cyber-Physical Systems in Simulink Requirements Tables

2026-06-02

AI Summary

This work addresses a critical limitation of traditional program repair approaches, which focus solely on code while overlooking the possibility that requirements themselves may be erroneous or outdated, leading to inconsistencies between system implementation and intended specifications. To bridge this gap, the paper introduces the first automated requirement repair framework tailored for Simulink Requirements Tables, shifting the repair target from code to requirements. The framework analyzes system execution traces, handles real-valued temporal signals, evaluates the semantics of declarative requirements, and automatically generates corrective patches. Evaluated across six real-world case studies involving twelve requirements, seven variants of the framework successfully produced correct and meaningful repairs, effectively restoring compliance between requirements and system behavior and addressing a key research gap in the co-evolution of requirements and implementations.

Abstract

The development of complex software systems, e.g., cyber-physical systems (CPSs), involves continuous evolution of both system implementations and their requirements. These two artifacts often proceed independently, creating a risk of misalignment. For example, a system may be updated due to implementation-level concerns, yielding a new version that no longer satisfies its original requirements. Traditional compliance recovery techniques, e.g., automated program repair, address this problem by modifying the system while assuming that requirements are correct. However, faulty, outdated or inadequate requirements are a well-documented challenge in practice, motivating the complementary task of requirement repair. In this paper, we propose a framework that leverages system execution data to repair misaligned CPS requirements, thereby restoring requirement-to-system compliance. Our approach evaluates the correctness of declarative requirements over time-based, real-valued signals expressed using the MATLAB Simulink Requirements Tables language. We evaluate seven variants of our framework on six real-world case studies covering 12 requirements. Results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed framework in producing correct and useful repaired requirements.

Problem

• requirements repair
• cyber-physical systems
• requirement-to-system compliance
• Simulink Requirements Tables
• misaligned requirements

Innovation

• requirement repair
• cyber-physical systems
• Simulink Requirements Tables
• automated repair
• system compliance