A study on user-friendly formal specification languages for requirements formalization

Formal methods and languages are used to prove the correctness of various industrial systems, especially mission-critical ones. They can also be viewed as a means to provide safety and correctness demonstration to the stakeholders of such systems. In domains such as nuclear power plant engineering, the benefits from structured safety evidences would seem obvious. However, most stakeholders in nuclear power industry are not even familiar with formal notations. As a result, to promote the applications of formal methods in practice, the first step is to make formal specification languages (FSLs) more accessible. With user-friendly FSLs, users can focus on safety requirements rather than on their sophisticated formalization. This paper, as a preliminary work towards an integrated framework supporting transparent safety demonstration, reviews existing approaches applied to facilitate requirements formalization and formal specifications. Moreover, the common features of user-friendly languages and their tool supports are also summarized.