Automatic generation of goal-tree from statecharts requirements specification

Formal specification and analysis of software in nuclear power plants are known more important as the size and complexity of the software being used increases. Recently the fault tree analysis is applied to the software requirement specification written in Statecharts [1], which is the widely used formal specification language for safety critical systems. However, the existing automatic fault tree generation techniques [2,3] are not suitable for nuclear power plants’ software that operates periodically with the input events. This article proposes an event-based goal tree generation technique that can be used as a candidate for the fault tree and that is suitable for the characteristics of the software in nuclear power plants.