Improvement in Requirement Specifications Using Petri Nets

Abstract

Requirements Engineering was in the forefront for a period of 25 years from 1970. Requirements specification development is a field in which several contributions have been made over the years. It is difficult to analyze all the techniques, to classify them, to determine and compare their advantages and disadvantages. The paper chooses to look at three selected techniques - one each of informal, formatted (structured informal) and formal types - of those that have been presented over the years. The paper looks at one of the first techniques given way back in 1970s for a formatted one and has chosen the Transnet approach as formal method for expressing an ATM system requirements specification. The formal type of requirement specifications is also applied to another example, Library system, wherein inconsistency and incompleteness in the drawn Petri net is determined and corrected. The paper thus demonstrates the usage of Petri nets for developing complete, unambiguous, correct, and consistent requirement specification.