Improving Structured Analysis — Achieving Preciseness, Executability, and Real-Time Specification
Michael von der Beeck · Berichte des German Chapter of the ACM · 1993
SA-RT-IM (Structured Analysis with Real-Time extensions and Information Modelling — is a graphical requirements analysis method, combining well-known techniques like data flow diagrams, state transition diagrams, and the entity relationship model. Despite being widespread, SA-RT-IM suffers from considerable drawbacks: It does not express concurrent control clearly, it lacks in specifying hard real-time constraints, it is not executable, and its syntax and semantics are defined incompletely and ambiguously. Our improvements shall remove these disadvantages: We use Timed Statecharts for the specification of concurrent and timed control processes, introduce additional data flow attributes and additional control flow types, use finite automata for defining precise semantics of data and control processes, develop a table specifying the activation condition of a data process, and present possibilities to make SA-RT-IM executable.