Time and Processes: Towards Engineering Temporal Requirements

Processes are ubiquitous for modeling dynamic phenomena in many areas like business, production, health care, robotics etc. Many of these applications require to adequately deal with temporal aspects. Nevertheless, temporal aspects are not yet prominently treated in requirements engineering. Models for representing requirements need to express temporal properties of the context resp. the environment, which have to be taken into account for designing systems. And they need to express temporal conditions, which have to be satisfied or which represent properties of goals that should be reached. Models, therefore, contain constructs for durations, temporal constraints like allowed time between events, and deadlines. Furthermore, these models need a notion of correctness and we discuss different notions like satisfiability and controllability, and techniques, which can be employed to check these properties of these models at design time.