Capture, integration, and analysis of digital system requirements with conceptual graphs

Initial requirements for new digital systems and products that are generally expressed in a variety of notations including diagrams and natural language can be automatically translated to a common knowledge representation for integration, for consistency and completeness analysis, and for further automatic synthesis. In this paper, block diagrams, flowcharts, timing diagrams, and English as used in specifying digital systems requirements are considered as examples of source notations for system requirements. The knowledge representation selected for this work is a form of semantic networks called conceptual graphs. For each source notation, a basis set of semantic primitives in terms of conceptual graphs is given, together with an algorithm for automatically generating conceptual structures from the notation. The automatic generation of conceptual structures from English presumes a restricted sublanguage of English and feedback to the author for verification of the interpretation. Mechanisms for integrating the separate conceptual structures generated from individual requirements expressions using schemata are discussed, and methods are illustrated for consistency and completeness analysis.