A Lightweight Multilevel Markup Language for Connecting Software Requirements and Simulations

[Context] Simulation is a powerful tool to validate specified requirements especially for complex systems that constantly monitor and react to characteristics of their environment. The simulators for such systems are complex themselves as they simulate multiple actors with multiple interacting functions in a number of different scenarios. To validate requirements in such simulations, the requirements must be related to the simulation runs. [Problem] In practice, engineers are reluctant to state their requirements in terms of structured languages or models that would allow for a straightforward relation of requirements to simulation runs. Instead, the requirements are expressed as unstructured natural language text that is hard to assess in a set of complex simulation runs. Therefore, the feedback loop between requirements and simulation is very long or non-existent at all. [Principal idea] We aim to close the gap between requirements specifications and simulation by proposing a lightweight markup language for requirements. Our markup language provides a set of annotations on different levels that can be applied to natural language requirements. The annotations are mapped to simulation events. As a result, meaningful information from a set of simulation runs is shown directly in the requirements specification. [Contribution] Instead of forcing the engineer to write requirements in a specific way just for the purpose of relating them to a simulator, the markup language allows annotating the already specified requirements up to a level that is interesting for the engineer. We evaluate our approach by analyzing 8 original requirements of an automotive system in a set of 100 simulation runs.