Centre for Technology Transfer
(Charleroi)
CAT Project
Tools for the Modelling and Analysis of the Requirements for Telecommunication Systems
Project Description
Requirements Analysis is considered as a crutial activity of the software lifecycle and has a strong impact on its maintenability. The requirement document forms a contractual basis between customers expressing their needs about the software to be developed, and the software engineer in charge of implementing it.Several formalisms (e.g. MERISE, SADT and OMT) are currently available. They are used to describe the functional part of the requirements document. But these approaches have two weaknesses. On one hand, they do not allow to model all the apects of the requirements document (viz. deadlines, security and reliability aspects, etc.). On the other hand, it is not possible to develop powerful tools to support those modelling languages (i.e. tools which checks the soundness of the requirements document and which help the adequacy of the requirements document with the real requirements expressed by the customers).
The goal of the CAT applied research project is the development of CASE tools to support the modelling and the analysis of requirements for distributed and real-time systems. These tools will rely on the ALBERT language developed at the University of Namur and which has been used to model requirements for telecommunication applications, computer integrated manufacturing and distributed process control.
Through its goal, CAT project aims to:
- reinforce the know-how in requirements analysis currently available in some companies;
- sensitize and offer guidance to companies experiencing problems with the writing of requirements documents.
The Staff
- Prof. Pierre-Yves Schobbens, promotor
- Bernard Jungen, researcher
- Luc Claes, computer scientist
- Michaël Petit, researcher
- Patrick Heymans, researcher
Former members
- Prof. Eric Dubois, promotor
- François Chabot, researcher
- Philippe Du Bois, researcher
- Laurent Ferier, researcher
- Jean-Marc Zeippen, researcher
Timing of the project
The project has started on April 1, 1995 and would normally have ended on December 31, 1999. After a period extension it finally ended on June 30, 2001.
Funding
The project is sponsored by the Directorate General for Technology, Research and Energy of the Ministery of the Walloon Region. It is lead in the framework of the Objective 1 of the European Union.(by Bernard Jungen)