Using SWRL rules for requirements engineering: Application to ERTMS/SRS specifications
Khaled Bahloul, Marwa Sahnoun, Tarak Chaari · 2018
ERTMS is the European Rail Traffic Management System implemented by the European Railway Agency. This project aims at making rail transport safer and more competitive. It focuses on the regularization and standardization of train and signalization control at a European level. However, the safety analysis is not included in the system specification. Consequently, it has to be done by experts in an ad-hoc way by analyzing complex, sparse and voluminous security documents. These experts spend a considerable time to look for necessary information to enter new simulation scenarios in the ERTMS platform. The aim of this work is to propose a solution for structuring security requirements for easier use and also to the extraction of implicit knowledge which is not explicitly defined in the available documents. The proposed solution is based on the use of ontologies to structure the explicit requirements and extract implicit ones from them. First, we have proposed a methodology for developing the ERTMS Ontology using the OWL language. Then, we extended this ontology by representations of explicit security requirements. After that, we defined an extensible set of semantic inference rules which automatically extract implicit knowledge allowing better use of the ERTMS platform. These rules, which are implemented using the SWRL language, can be generic or specific for certain simulation scenarios. The aim of this ontology is the formalization of these ERTMS specifications in order to obtain a data structure that can be reusable by industries to develop the ERTMS products. The future work will focus on the integration of the ontology and the associated inference library rules in the ERTMS system for automatic generation of instances, concepts and relationships defined in the ontology.