Operational definitions for system requirements as the basis of design automation

This paper introduces formal definitions to system requirements as the basis of design automation. Semi-formal requirements for real-time systems are expressed in the form of system verification diagrams, and the graph model of behaviour represents the design, capturing three aspects of system behaviour—control, data and interpretation. The design model is considered operational as an underlying token machine governs its actual behaviour. To achieve automatic design synthesis, the semantics of each construct in the requirement model have to be formally defined. These definitions constitute the core of a knowledge base in an automatic design synthesis tool.